Philip Conrad James Donoghue FRS[1] is a British palaeontologist[5] and Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol.

[2][6][7] Donoghue was educated at the University of Leicester where he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in geology in 1992[4] and PhD in Paleontology in 1997 for research supervised by Richard Aldridge and Mark Purnell.

Donoghue's research[8] focuses on major transitions in evolutionary history, including the origin and early evolution of vertebrates, animals, and plants.

He was pioneering in first demonstrating the utility of synchrotron imaging in palaeontology and has been a world leader in driving forward our understanding of the remarkable fossil embryos from the late pre-Cambrian and Cambrian and their biological significance.

His work takes developmental and genomic data constrained by the fossil record to bring new insights into large-scale evolutionary patterns and the relationship between phenotypic and gene regulatory evolution.Donoghue has been on the Councils of the Palaeontological Association, Systematics Association, the Micropalaeontological Society and the European Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology.