Eric Harris Davidson (April 13, 1937 – September 1, 2015) was an American developmental biologist at the California Institute of Technology.
[1][2] Davidson was best known for his pioneering work on the role of gene regulation in evolution, on embryonic specification and for spearheading the effort to sequence the genome of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus.
[7] Davidson's Ph.D. work entailed studying RNA synthesis and gene expression in early development of the anuran Xenopus laevis in the lab of Alfred Mirsky at Rockefeller University.
Shortly before his death from a heart attack in 2015,[12] Davidson co-authored a landmark review book [13] providing a grand synthesis of the theory and experimental evidence relating to the design and function of genomic regulatory networks within the animal taxonomic clade of Bilateria.
In 1992, Kellie Whittaker, a doctoral student at Caltech sued the university and Prof. Eric Davidson, stating that he had repeatedly asked for sexual favours between 1989 and 1991.