Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins was born in 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya, and moved with his family to England at a very young age. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he spent two years as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to Oxford in 1970. Until 2008, he held the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature in the United Kingdom and has received numerous honorary distinctions and awards. He is also a fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. His writing has earned him honorary doctorates in science and letters. In 1987, his first book, "The Selfish Gene," was voted by the public as the most exciting science book of all time in a Royal Society competition. He has been honored with many awards, including the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Award in 1990, the Nakayama Prize in 1994, the International Cosmos Prize in 1997, the Kistler Prize in 2001, and the Shakespeare Prize in 2005.