Frederick Wallace Edwards, an English entomologist who specialised in the Diptera, was educated at the Cambridge County School and then studied at Christ's College, University of Cambridge, where he qualified as Bachelor of Arts (BA). Later he obtained the degree Doctor of Science (ScD). He joined the staff of the British Museum (Natural History) in 1910 and remained there for most of his career, rising to deputy keeper of entomology in 1937. He was a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and in 1939 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1911 he married May Williams, with whom he had three daughters.
Edwards went on expeditions for the British Museum to Norway and Sweden (1923), Switzerland and Austria (1925), Argentina and Chile (1926/7), Corsica and the United States (1928), the Baltic (1933), Kenya and Uganda (1934), and the Pyrenees (1935). He was an outdoors type of person, as his recreational activities consisted of cycling and camping. In addition to numerous entomological papers he wrote the following works: Mosquitoes and their relation to disease (1916, 1923, 1931, 1949), British mosquitoes and their control (with S.P. James, 1925, 1934, 1949), British non-biting midges (Diptera, Chironomidae) (1929), Mosquitoes of the Ethiopian region (1936-1941), and British blood-sucking flies (with H. Oldroyd and J. Smart, 1939). A contribution by him to science in southern Africa was "An annotated list of mosquitoes occurring at Durban", which was published in the Annals of the Durban Museum (1914-1917, Vol. 1, pp. 160-166).
