David Mark Hillis (born December 21, 1958, in Copenhagen, Denmark) is an American evolutionary biologist, and the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Hillis lived his early years in Denmark, Belgian Congo, India, and the United States, where he developed his interests in biology and biodiversity.
[1] His younger son, Jonathan Hillis, served in 2011 as the National Chief of the Order of the Arrow, the Honor Society of the Boy Scouts of America.
[1] During this time Hillis developed molecular approaches for reconstructing the evolutionary history of organisms, or phylogeny, with a particular emphasis on the relationships of amphibians.
He also made significant contributions to the understanding of hybridization, molecular processes of evolutionary change, and statistical analysis of biological phylogenies.