William Charles Earnshaw is an American biologist who is Professor of Chromosome Dynamics at the University of Edinburgh,[2][3][4][5][6][7] where he has been a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow since 1996.
[8][9] Earnshaw was educated at Lenox School for Boys, Colby College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was awarded a PhD in 1977 for research on Enterobacteria phage P22 supervised by Jonathan King.
[8] His former doctoral students include Jan Bergmann,[20] Anca Petruti-Mot,[21] Susana Ribeiro,[22] Laura Wood,[23] Zhenjie Xu,[24] and Nikolaj Zuleger.
His pioneering use of scleroderma patient sera identified the first centromeric proteins and recent studies employing human synthetic artificial chromosomes are mapping the epigenetic landscape required for kinetochore assembly.
[27]Earnshaw is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).