Participants

Tobias Uller

Tobias Uller

Cluster:
Agential Behavior and Plasticity in Evolution
Project:
Evolution and organismal goal-directedness
Role:
Subaward Principal Investigator
Institution:
Lund University

Tobias Uller received his PhD from University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2004. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wollongong, Australia, he returned to Europe in 2007 to take up a Departmental Lectureship at the University of Oxford. In 2015, he moved to Lund University, Sweden, where he now is Professor of Evolutionary Biology. Uller has held several fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Arizona, a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Oxford, and a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship at Lund University. Uller’s research is characterized by an integrative approach – from molecular and developmental biology to ecology – guided by mathematical modelling and conceptual analysis. His projects span a range of topics, but most are designed to reveal how the development, physiology and behaviour of organisms influence their evolution.

Günter Wagner

Günter Wagner

Role:
Scientific Board of Advisors
Institution:
Yale University

Günter Wagner is the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. He is a chemical engineer by training and studied zoology and mathematics at the University of Vienna where he earned a Ph. D. in zoology. From 1985 till 1991 he was at the Department of Zoology at the University of Vienna, Austria and in 1991 joined Yale’s Department of Biology. In 1997 he became the first chair of Yale’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Since 2010 he is a member of the Yale Systems Biology Institute. His research interests include the evolution of gene regulation, the evolution of pregnancy, and the evolutionary biology of cancer and female sexuality. GPW is a Mac Arthur Fellow, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and a corresponding foreign member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Denis Walsh

Denis Walsh

Cluster:
Agential Behavior and Plasticity in Evolution
Role:
Cluster Coordinator

Denis Walsh is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science, and Department of Ecology and evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He is a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto, and a co-Pi in the Agency in Living Systems projec, currently funded by JTF. His recent research investigates the phenomenon of agency in the natural world, and in particular its implications for the theory of evolution.

Richard Watson

Richard Watson

Cluster:
Agential Behavior and Plasticity in Evolution
Project:
Evolution and organismal goal-directedness, Exploratory mechanisms, agency, and evolution
Role:
Subaward Principal Investigator

Dr Richard Watson studies evolution, learning, cognition and society and their unifying algorithmic principles. He studied Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Systems at Sussex University, then PhD Computer Science at Brandeis in Boston. His current work deepens the unification of evolution and learning - specifically, with connectionist models of learning and cognition, familiar in neural network research – to address topics such as evolvability, ecological memory, evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs), phenotypic plasticity, the extended evolutionary synthesis, collective intelligence and 'design'. He has also developed new computational methods for combinatorial optimisation (deep optimisation), exploiting a unification of deep learning and ‘deep evolution’ (i.e. ETIs). He is author of "Compositional evolution" (MIT Press), was featured as "one to watch in AI” in Intelligent Systems magazine, and his paper “How Can Evolution Learn” in TREE, attracted the ISAL award 2016. He is now Associate Professor at the University of Southampton.

Danielle  Way

Danielle Way

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
Geofunctions: purposes and agents in global environmental sciences
Institution:
Western University

Danielle Way is an Associate Professor in Biology at Western and the Director of the Biotron Experimental Climate Change Research Centre. Way specializes in understanding plant responses to rising atmospheric CO2 and warming, combining biochemistry, physiology and modeling. She is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, and received the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists’ C.D. Nelson Award for outstanding early career research in plant science. Way holds appointments with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Lab and Duke University, and is the Reviews Editor for Global Change Biology and the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Plant, Cell & Environment, top journals in her field. She has 81 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals such as PNAS, Nature Ecology & Evolution and Global Change Biology, resulting in >6075 citations and an h-index of 35.

Tom Williams

Tom Williams

Cluster:
Higher-Level Agency and Directionality in Ecology and Earth Science
Project:
Chance versus purpose in biosphere evolution

Tom is an Associate Professor in Molecular Evolution at the University of Bristol, UK. His research focuses on the phylogenetics and comparative genomics of early life, particularly the deep relationships among Archaea and Bacteria and the origins of eukaryotic cells.