Professor Anjali Goswami

Professor of Palaeobiology

Professor Anjali Goswami is a Research Leader in Palaeobiology and Dean of Postgraduate Education at the Natural History Museum (NHM) and an Honorary Professor of Palaeobiology at University College London. She currently serves as President of the Linnean Society of London, the first person of colour elected to this role in its 235-year history.  Anjali completed a joint BSc with High Honours in Geological and Biological Sciences from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Chicago, before moving to the UK to take up a US National Science Foundation research fellow at the NHM. She then spent 10 years as a faculty member first at the University of Cambridge and then University College London before returning to the NHM in 2017.  
 
Anjali’s expertise is in vertebrate evolution and development, particularly using high-resolution 3D images of specimens to quantify and reconstruct the evolution of biodiversity and understand how development, ecology and large-scale environmental effects have shaped animal evolution through deep time. She has published more than 130 scientific articles on the evolution of different groups from insects to dinosaurs, but her main interest is in the evolution of mammals. She has searched for fossils all over the world, from Svalbard to Madagascar, and currently leads expeditions in Argentina and India. Anjali also created and manages www. phenome10k.org, a free online database for 3D biological images for research and education.

She was awarded Humanists UK’s Darwin Day Medal in 2023 and delivered the Darwin Day Lecture, The Speed of Life: A Deep Time Perspective to a sellout audience.