Adam Eyre-Walker is an evolutionary geneticist interested in the rates, patterns and effects of mutations. His work has focussed principally on the rate of adaptive evolution, the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations and the interaction between selection and genetic drift. He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1992, before doing two post-docs at Rutgers University in the USA. In 1997 he returned to the UK as a Royal Society University Fellow at the University of Sussex, where he has been ever since. He was awarded the Genetics Society's Balfour Prize in 2002, the European Society of Evolutionary Biology President's prize in 2012 and in 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

His research group currently comprises one post-doc, Ying Chen Eyre-Walker, and three PhD students, Lillith Zijmers, Loveday Lewin and Eleanor Armitage.