Günter P. Wagner
| Günter P. Wagner | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 28, 1954 Vienna, Austria |
| Fields | evolutionary biology, evolutionary developmental biology |
Günter P. Wagner (born May 28, 1954 in Vienna, Austria) is Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at Yale University, and head of the Wagner Lab.
After undergraduate education in chemical engineering, Wagner studied zoology and mathematical logic at the University of Vienna, Austria. During his graduate study, Wagner worked with the Viennese zoologist Rupert Riedl and the theoretical chemist Peter Schuster, and finished his PhD in theoretical population genetics in 1979. Wagner conducted postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen and Tübingen, as well as at the University of Göttingen.
Wagner began his academic career as assistant professor in the Theoretical Biology Department of the University of Vienna in 1985. In 1991, he moved to Yale University as a full professor of biology and has served as the first chair of Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolution 1997-2002 and then 2005-2008.
The focus of Wagner's work is on the evolution of complex characters. His research utilizes both the theoretical tools of population genetics as well as experimental approaches in evolutionary developmental biology. Wagner has contributed substantially to the current understanding of evolvability of complex organisms, the origin of novel characters, and modularity.
Wagner’s early work was focused on mathematical population genetics. Together with the mathematician Reinhard Bürger at the University of Vienna, he contributed to the theory of mutation-selection balance and the evolution of dominance modifiers. Later Wagner shifted his focus on issues of the evolution of variational properties like canalization and modularity. He introduced the seminal distinction between variation and variability, the former describing the actually existing differences among individuals while the latter measures the tendency to vary, as measured in mutation rate and mutational variance. He published the first mathematical model for the evolution of genetic canalization, and thus contributed to the renaissance of studies of canalization in the mid 1990s. His more recent work is on the measurement of gene interaction, the evolution of evolvability and how it relates to the evolution of genetic architecture.
...
Wikipedia