ARMAND MARIE LEROI was born in Wellington, New Zealand. A Dutch citizen, his youth was spent in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. He studied at Dalhousie University, Halifax and the University of California Irvine. After postdoctoral work at Albert Einstein College of Medicine he was appointed to a lectureship at Imperial College London where he is now Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. His primary research concerns the control and evolution of life-histories; he works on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

He is the author of a popular book about developmental genetics, Mutants (2003), most recently, of The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science,?and has written and presented several television series, most recently "What Darwin Did Not Know" (BBC4, 2009) and "Darwin's Secret Notebooks" (National Geographic, 2009).