Biologist Michael Lachmann will join the Institute’s resident faculty next summer, SFI Chair of Faculty Jennifer Dunne announced today. Lachmann currently is an assistant professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
“Michael brings deep expertise in theoretical and computational biology to SFI,” Dunne says. “He is committed to addressing big questions at the intersection of evolutionary theory and information theory.”
Lachmann has longstanding ties to SFI, having attended the Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School in 1994 while studying at Stanford University under Science Board member and External Professor Marc Feldman. After receiving his PhD in 1998, Lachmann came to SFI as a postdoctoral fellow and worked with SFI Professor Cris Moore and External Professor Mark Newman, among others. Lachmann left SFI for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in 2002.
His interests have broadened, but evolution continues to be a focus. “I am interested in understanding the process of evolution itself – how it gathers information, how it originates, how it creates adaptation and function,” Lachmann says. “The interdisciplinarity of SFI and the wide interests of the people working and visiting there will help me do such research.”
An SFI theme week last August, Combining Information Theory and Game Theory, “was so fruitful and interesting for me that I realized how good it would be to work at SFI again,” he says.
In addition to studying the origins and functions of evolution, Lachmann says he plans to continue research on the connections between information and evolution, the evolution of biological differentiation, and the population genetics of early humans.
More about Michael Lachmann