Gonzalo Giribet

Gonzalo Giribet is a Spanish-American invertebrate zoologist and Alexander Agassiz Professor of zoology working on systematics and biogeography at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard University. He is a past president of the Willi Hennig Society and the International Society for Invertebrate Morphology, and vice-president of the Sociedad Española de Malacología (Spanish Malacological Society).

Giribet was born in Burgos and grew up in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain to a legal administrator and an engineer who worked in nuclear power plants. As a boy, he enjoyed windsurfing, beachcombing, and collecting sea shells. He attended, and then graduated from, the University of Barcelona in 1993, with bachelor's degrees in zoology and fundamental biology. He completed his doctorate in animal biology in 1997. He then moved to the American Museum of Natural History for postdoctoral research with Ward Wheeler, and from there moved to Harvard University in 2000, where he went through the ranks until becoming full professor in 2007.

In 1996, he and his Spanish colleagues discovered that arthropods are monophyletic and that Tardigrade is their sister group. In the same year, he, with the same group of authors, suggested that metazoan species are polymorphistic after he studied flatworm groups such as Dugesia, Seriata, Tricladida and Turbellaria. In 1999, he proposed to include Cycliophora as a sister group of Syndermata.