Biology professor Jerry Allen Coyne was born in 1949 and teaches in the University of Chicago's Department of Ecology and Evolution. Coyne was the 1971 class valedictorian at the College of William & Mary. He received his Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University and an NIH postdoc in genetics at UC Davis. Coyne has been the Vice President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and an associate editor of Evolution and The American Naturalist. Coyne's work has been published in scientific journals as well as The New York Times and The New Republic. He is known for his opposition to the creationist theory of intelligent design. Coyne wrote the bestselling book Why Evolution is True and co-authored Speciation with H. Allen Orr.