[2] Keightley was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a PhD in 1989 for research on genetic variation[3] supervised by William G.

[3] During his doctoral work he collaborated with Henrik Kacser on a highly cited paper on genetic dominance.

His nomination reads: Peter Keightley is a leading evolutionary geneticist.

His work combines theoretical modelling, genetic experimentation and bioinformatic studies of DNA sequences, in an unusually productive and innovative way.

This has led to a much improved estimate of the deleterious mutation rate for the genome as a whole.