Raised in Overbrook Hills section of Lower Merion Township[5] (contiguous to City of Philadelphia) and a graduate of Lower Merion High School,[6] Shubin earned a A.B. from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 1987.[7] He also studied at the University of California, Berkeley.[8]
Shubin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
Shubin was ABC News' "Person of the Week" in April 2006 when Tiktaalik was unveiled,[9] and made appearances on The Colbert Report January 14, 2008 and January 9, 2013.[10]
The Communication Awards of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine awarded a $20,000 prize for excellence in communicating science to the general public to Michael Rosenfeld, David Dugan, and Neil Shubin in Film/Radio/TV on October 14, 2015, for Your Inner Fish.[11] The awards are given to individuals in four categories: books, film/radio/TV, magazine/newspaper and online, and are supported by the W. M. Keck Foundation. Neil Shubin hosted Your Inner Fish on PBS.[12] The show was produced by Windfall Films and Tangled Bank Studios, a production company for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that makes materials available for science classroom education.[13]
He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2017.[14] He also served as interim co-director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in 2017.[15]
