Paul Brakefield
Paul Martin Brakefield FRS (born 31 May 1952) is a British evolutionary biologist. He was Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity College, and from 2010 to 2019 he directed the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. Earlier, he held the Chair in Evolutionary Biology at Leiden University in the Netherlands and led the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (2005–2007). He also served as President of the Linnean Society of London from 2015 to 2018. He retired in 2019, with Rebecca Kilner succeeding him as museum director.
Brakefield is best known for his research on butterfly eyespots, especially in the species Bicyclus anynana. The butterfly species Bicyclus brakefieldi is named in his honour.
He has received several honors: Fellow of the Royal Society (2010), foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (2014), and honorary fellow of the Royal Entomological Society (2018). He was born in Woking, Surrey.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 07:16 (CET).