UCL RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS, EVOLUTION AND ENVIRONMENT

The department was formed during the recent reorganisation of the Faculty of Life Sciences by bringing together scientists with shared interests in genetics, environmental and evolutionary biology who had previously been scattered among a variety of distinct departments. It traces its origins to the now extinct Department of Comparative Anatomy, founded in 1826 and the first in Britain to offer a Zoology degree.

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Some great scientific figures of the past have been associated with the Department - whose own building stands on the site of Charles Darwin's home.  They include Robert Grant (who taught Darwin in Edinburgh and whose extraordinary collection of animal specimens we still possess), Sir Francis Galton (Darwin's cousin, and the founder of the modern study of human genetics and - less creditably - of eugenics, who left a large sum to establish the Galton Laboratory).

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