Andrew Herbert Knoll (born 1951) is the Fisher Research Professor of Natural History[1] and a Research Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences[2] at Harvard University.[2][3] Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Andrew Knoll graduated from Lehigh University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973[2][3] and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977[3] for a dissertation titled "Studies in Archean and Early Proterozoic Paleontology."[2] Knoll taught at Oberlin College for five years before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1982.[2] At Harvard, he serves in the departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Earth and Planetary Sciences.[1][2]
Andrew Knoll
Born
(1951-04-23) April 23, 1951 (age 73) West Reading, Pennsylvania
Studies in Archean and early Proterozoic paleontology(1977)
Website
eps.harvard.edu/people/andrew-h-knoll
Scientific workedit
Andrew Knoll is best known for his contributions to Precambrianpaleontology and biogeochemistry. He has discovered microfossil records of early life in Spitsbergen, East Greenland, Siberia, China, Namibia, western North America, and Australia,[1] and was among the first to apply principles of taphonomy and paleoecology to their interpretation. He has also elucidated early records of skeletonized animals in Namibia and remarkable fossils of the EdiacaranDoushantuo Formation, China, preserved in exceptional cellular detail by early diagenetic phosphate precipitation. Knoll and colleagues authored the first paper to demonstrate strong stratigraphic variation in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates and organic matter preserved in Neoproterozoic (1000–539 million years ago) sedimentary rocks, and Knoll's group also demonstrated that mid-Proterozoic carbonates display little isotopic variation through time, in contrast to both older and younger successions.
Knoll has longstanding interests in biomineralization, paleobotany, plankton evolution, and mass extinction.[1][2] Among other things, Knoll and his colleagues were the first to hypothesize that rapid build-up of carbon dioxide played a key role in end-Permian mass extinction, 252 million years ago. More generally, Knoll uses physiology as a conceptual bridge to integrate geochemical records of environmental change with paleontological records of biological history. He has also served as a member of the science team for NASA's MER rover mission to Mars.[4]
Honors include membership in the US National Academy of Sciences,[5] the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,[6] the American Philosophical Society,[7] the American Academy of Microbiology, and Foreign Membership in the Royal Society of London and the National Academy of Sciences, India, as well as the Paleontological Society Medal, the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society (London), the Moore Medal of the Society for Sedimentary Geology, the Oparin Medal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, the Sven Berggren Prize of the Royal Physiographic Society, Sweden, and both the Walcott and Thompson medals of the US National Academy of Sciences. He received the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for "Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth". In 2018, Knoll received the International Prize for Biology, conferred in Tokyo in the presence of the Emperor and Empress of Japan. In 2022, he received the Crafoord Prize in Geosciences.
Booksedit
2004 – Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 277 pp., ISBN 978-0-691-12029-4
2007 – The Evolution of Primary Producers in the Sea. Falkowski, P. and A.H. Knoll, Eds. Elsevier, Burlington MA, 441 pp., ISBN 978-0-12-370518-1
2012 – Fundamentals of Geobiology. Knoll, A.H., D.E. Canfield and K. Konhauser, Eds. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester UK, 443 pp., ISBN 978-1-4051-8752-7
2013 – Biology: How Life Works. Morris, J., D. Hartl, A.H. Knoll, R. Lue, and others. Macmillan. 2nd Edition 2016: ISBN 978-1-319-06779-3; 4th Edition 2022.
2021 – A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. Knoll, A.H. Custom House, New York NY, 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-06-285391-2
Selected papersedit
Knoll, Andrew H.; Carroll, Sean B. (25 June 1999). "Early Animal Evolution: Emerging Views from Comparative Biology and Geology". Science. 284 (5423). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): 2129–2137. doi:10.1126/science.284.5423.2129. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 10381872.
Anbar, A. D.; Knoll, A. H. (16 August 2002). "Proterozoic Ocean Chemistry and Evolution: A Bioinorganic Bridge?". Science. 297 (5584). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): 1137–1142. Bibcode:2002Sci...297.1137A. CiteSeerX10.1.1.615.3041. doi:10.1126/science.1069651. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 12183619. S2CID 5578019.
Knoll, Andrew H.; Walter, Malcolm R.; Narbonne, Guy M.; Christie-Blick, Nicholas (30 July 2004). "A New Period for the Geologic Time Scale". Science. 305 (5684). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): 621–622. doi:10.1126/science.1098803. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 15286353. S2CID 32763298.
Knoll, A.H; Javaux, E.J; Hewitt, D; Cohen, P (5 May 2006). "Eukaryotic organisms in Proterozoic oceans". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 361 (1470). The Royal Society: 1023–1038. doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1843. ISSN 0962-8436. PMC1578724. PMID 16754612.
Tomitani, Akiko; Knoll, Andrew H.; Cavanaugh, Colleen M.; Ohno, Terufumi (4 April 2006). "The evolutionary diversification of cyanobacteria: Molecular–phylogenetic and paleontological perspectives". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 103 (14): 5442–5447. Bibcode:2006PNAS..103.5442T. doi:10.1073/pnas.0600999103. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC1459374. PMID 16569695.
Knoll, Andrew H.; Bambach, Richard K.; Payne, Jonathan L.; Pruss, Sara; Fischer, Woodward W. (2007). "Paleophysiology and end-Permian mass extinction". Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 256 (3–4). Elsevier BV: 295–313. Bibcode:2007E&PSL.256..295K. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2007.02.018. ISSN 0012-821X.
Wilson, Jonathan P.; Knoll, Andrew H.; Holbrook, N. Michele; Marshall, Charles R. (2008). "Modeling fluid flow in Medullosa, an anatomically unusual Carboniferous seed plant". Paleobiology. 34 (4). Cambridge University Press (CUP): 472–493. Bibcode:2008Pbio...34..472W. doi:10.1666/07076.1. ISSN 0094-8373. S2CID 54194897.
Tosca, Nicholas J.; Knoll, Andrew H.; McLennan, Scott M. (30 May 2008). "Water Activity and the Challenge for Life on Early Mars". Science. 320 (5880). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): 1204–1207. Bibcode:2008Sci...320.1204T. doi:10.1126/science.1155432. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 18511686. S2CID 27253871.
Tosca, Nicholas J.; Knoll, Andrew H. (2009). "Juvenile chemical sediments and the long term persistence of water at the surface of Mars". Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 286 (3–4). Elsevier BV: 379–386. Bibcode:2009E&PSL.286..379T. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2009.07.004. ISSN 0012-821X. S2CID 39532723.
Knoll, A.H. (2011) The multiple origins of complex multicellularity. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 39: 217–239.
Knoll, Andrew H.; Fischer, Woodward W. (15 September 2011). "Skeletons and Ocean Chemistry: The Long View". Ocean Acidification. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780199591091.003.0009. ISBN 978-0-19-959109-1.
Parfrey, Laura Wegener; Lahr, Daniel J. G.; Knoll, Andrew H.; Katz, Laura A. (2 August 2011). "Estimating the timing of early eukaryotic diversification with multigene molecular clocks". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (33): 13624–13629. Bibcode:2011PNAS..10813624P. doi:10.1073/pnas.1110633108. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC3158185. PMID 21810989.
Cohen, Phoebe A.; Knoll, Andrew H. (2012). "Scale microfossils from the mid-Neoproterozoic Fifteenmile Group, Yukon Territory". Journal of Paleontology. 86 (5). Cambridge University Press (CUP): 775–800. Bibcode:2012JPal...86..775C. doi:10.1666/11-138.1. ISSN 0022-3360. S2CID 131120053.
Knoll, Andrew H. (10 August 2012). "Systems paleobiology". Geological Society of America Bulletin. 125 (1–2). Geological Society of America: 3–13. doi:10.1130/b30685.1. ISSN 0016-7606.
Bosak, Tanja; Knoll, Andrew H.; Petroff, Alexander P. (30 May 2013). "The Meaning of Stromatolites". Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. 41 (1). Annual Reviews: 21–44. Bibcode:2013AREPS..41...21B. doi:10.1146/annurev-earth-042711-105327. ISSN 0084-6597.
Sperling, E.A., C.A. Frieder, P.R. Girguis, A.V. Raman, L.A. Levin, and A.H. Knoll (2013) Oxygen, ecology, and the Cambrian radiation of animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 110: 13446–13451.
Knoll, A. H. (1 January 2014). "Paleobiological Perspectives on Early Eukaryotic Evolution". Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology. 6 (1). Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory: a016121. doi:10.1101/cshperspect.a016121. ISSN 1943-0264. PMC3941219. PMID 24384569.
Sperling, Erik A.; Knoll, Andrew H.; Girguis, Peter R. (4 December 2015). "The Ecological Physiology of Earth's Second Oxygen Revolution". Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. 46 (1). Annual Reviews: 215–235. doi:10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110512-135808. ISSN 1543-592X. S2CID 8606044.
Knoll, Andrew H.; Follows, Michael J. (26 October 2016). "A bottom-up perspective on ecosystem change in Mesozoic oceans". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 283 (1841). The Royal Society: 20161755. doi:10.1098/rspb.2016.1755. ISSN 0962-8452. PMC5095382. PMID 27798303.
Knoll, Andrew H.; Bergmann, Kristin D.; Strauss, Justin V. (5 November 2016). "Life: the first two billion years". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 371 (1707). The Royal Society: 20150493. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0493. ISSN 0962-8436. PMC5052739. PMID 27672146. S2CID 17286885.
Knoll, Andrew H.; Nowak, Martin A. (5 May 2017). "The timetable of evolution". Science Advances. 3 (5). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): e1603076. Bibcode:2017SciA....3E3076K. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1603076. ISSN 2375-2548. PMC5435417. PMID 28560344.
Muscente, A. D.; Prabhu, Anirudh; Zhong, Hao; Eleish, Ahmed; Meyer, Michael B.; Fox, Peter; Hazen, Robert M.; Knoll, Andrew H. (23 April 2018). "Quantifying ecological impacts of mass extinctions with network analysis of fossil communities". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 115 (20): 5217–5222. Bibcode:2018PNAS..115.5217M. doi:10.1073/pnas.1719976115. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC5960297. PMID 29686079.
Gilbert, Pupa U. P. A.; Porter, Susannah M.; Sun, Chang-Yu; Xiao, Shuhai; Gibson, Brandt M.; Shenkar, Noa; Knoll, Andrew H. (19 August 2019). "Biomineralization by particle attachment in early animals". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (36): 17659–17665. Bibcode:2019PNAS..11617659G. doi:10.1073/pnas.1902273116. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC6731633. PMID 31427519.
Laakso, Thomas A.; Sperling, Erik A.; Johnston, David T.; Knoll, Andrew H. (18 May 2020). "Ediacaran reorganization of the marine phosphorus cycle". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117 (22): 11961–11967. Bibcode:2020PNAS..11711961L. doi:10.1073/pnas.1916738117. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC7275700. PMID 32424088.
Wordsworth, Robin; Knoll, Andrew H.; Hurowitz, Joel; Baum, Mark; Ehlmann, Bethany L.; Head, James W.; Steakley, Kathryn (2021). "A coupled model of episodic warming, oxidation and geochemical transitions on early Mars". Nature Geoscience. 14 (3). Springer Science and Business Media LLC: 127–132. arXiv:2103.06736. Bibcode:2021NatGe..14..127W. doi:10.1038/s41561-021-00701-8. ISSN 1752-0894. S2CID 263788799.