W. Ford Doolittle

W. Ford Doolittle FRSC (born February 21, 1941 in Urbana, Illinois) is an evolutionary and molecular biologist. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is also the winner of the 2014 Herzberg Medal of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the 2017 Killam Prize.

Doolittle has made significant contributions to the study of cyanobacteria. He found evidence for the endosymbiont origins of chloroplasts, and developed a theoretical basis for the initial evolution of eukaryotes. He has shown the importance of horizontal gene transfer in prokaryotic evolution.

As of 2007^[update], he has been Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his BA in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University in 1963 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1967, under Charles Yanofsky. He went on to do postdoctoral fellowships with Sol Spiegelman and Norman R. Pace.