Andrew H. Knoll

Andrew Herbert Knoll (born 1951) is the Fisher Research Professor of Natural History and a Research Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.

Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Andrew Knoll graduated from Lehigh University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977 for a dissertation titled "Studies in Archean and Early Proterozoic Paleontology."

Knoll taught at Oberlin College for five years before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1982.

At Harvard, he serves in the departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Andrew Knoll is best known for his contributions to Precambrian paleontology and biogeochemistry.

He has discovered microfossil records of early life in Spitsbergen, East Greenland, Siberia, China, Namibia, western North America, and Australia, 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 Ediacaran Doushantuo 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.

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.

Honors include membership in the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, 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.