Andrew Rambaut is a British evolutionary biologist, as of 2020[update] professor of molecular evolution at the University of Edinburgh.

[2][4][5] Rambaut was based at Oxford until 2006, when he took up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship position and became Chair of Molecular Evolution at Edinburgh in 2010.

[6] In 2007, Rambaut published a paper with Alexei Drummond describing BEAST (Bayesian evolutionary analysis sampling trees), a software package for evolutionary analysis by molecular sequence variation, which uses Bayesian inference techniques;[7][8] this is freely available on GitHub.

[12][13] Holmes has said that it "took 52 minutes from receiving the code [from his Chinese colleague Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang] to publishing" on Virological.

"[16] Rambaut was one of the authors of the scientific paper The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,[17] which concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus".