Rate My Professor Stephen Wright

Professor Stephen Wright is a faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto, a Master of Science from McGill University, and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He completed an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Irvine, before joining the University of Toronto in 2008 as an assistant professor. He was promoted to full professor in 2016.

Professor Wright holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Population Genomics. His research focuses on plant evolutionary genomics, examining the forces that shape nucleotide polymorphism, genome evolution, adaptive evolution, and the effects of recombination, mating systems, and demographic history on genetic diversity in plant populations. He has served as chair and graduate chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from 2019 to 2022, with interim roles in 2023, and as Vice-Dean, Research and Infrastructure. He was appointed Interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science in 2025 and will serve as Dean from July 2026 to June 2031. His honors include the E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship, the Steacie Prize for Natural Sciences in 2017, the Margaret Dayhoff Award in 2016, admission to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2015, election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2024, the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution’s President’s Award in 2023, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and past presidency of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.