Andreas Wagner

How does nature innovate? How does it create novel adaptations that help organisms survive and reproduce? This question is central to Andreas Wagner’s research. His laboratory addresses this question through experimental evolution, comparative analysis of biological data, and mathematical modeling. In doing so, it studies complex objects, such as fitness landscapes and gene regulatory networks, that are not only central to biology but have also been important in SFI research. Wagner is also deeply interested in connecting our understanding of biological evolution to that of cultural, and in particular, technological evolution.

 

Andreas Wagner received his Ph.D. in 1995 at Yale University, where his research won the J.S. Nicholas Prize for best dissertation in the field. He is currently a professor in the department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), where he leads a laboratory of more than a dozen international researchers in evolutionary biology and complex systems studies.  He has (co)authored more than 250 scientific papers, including for such general publications as Nature, Science, and PNAS. Wagner is also the author of six books. The most recent of them is Sleeping Beauties (OneWorld), a Times and Telegraph book of the year 2023. Wagner has held research fellowships at several prestigious institutions, such as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin (Germany), the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Bures-sur-Yvette (France), and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS, South Africa). He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and an elected Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).  An Austrian-born U.S. citizen, Wagner lives in Zurich, Switzerland.