Participants

Ryan Adams is a machine learning researcher and Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Ryan completed his Ph.D. in physics under David MacKay at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and a member of St. John's College. Following his Ph.D. Ryan spent two years as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Toronto as a part of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. From 2011-2016, he was an Assistant Professor at Harvard University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 2015, Ryan sold the company he co-founded, Whetlab, to Twitter and he spent three years in industry at Twitter and Google before joining the faculty at Princeton in 2018. Ryan has won paper awards at ICML, UAI, and AISTATS, received the DARPA Young Faculty Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He also co-hosted the popular Talking Machines podcast.

J. Arvid Ågren is an evolutionary biologist, currently a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. His research focuses on genomic conflicts and he has published widely on their biology and implications for evolutionary theory. He also works on foundations of selfish gene theory and is the author of The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution (Oxford University Press 2021). He holds degrees from the universities of Edinburgh and Toronto, and prior to joining Uppsala he was a postdoc at Cornell and Harvard.

I have always been interested in how math can help us understand big questions of evolution and behavior. Much of my work explores the evolutionary dynamics of social or collective behavior, and how this is affected by spatial or social network structure within the evolving population. More generally, I seek to deepen our understanding of evolution by proving mathematical theorems that apply to a wide range of evolutionary processes. I currently serve as an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Emmanuel College in Boston, MA. Before that, I obtained my PhD in Mathematics from Boston University, and completed a postdoc in Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University.

Joanna Masel is a mathematical modeler and data scientist whose researches foundational questions about how evolution works. These include the population genetic basis for evolvability, applications of evolvability theories to the de novo birth of genes from junk DNA, and subsequent directionality in protein evolution. They also include the puzzle of how populations withstand high rates of deleterious mutation, and the search for general principles to organize the enormous variety of adaptations/goals we observe in nature and tension among them. As well as evolutionary biology, she also dabbles in many other fields from biochemistry to education to economics, and most recently, pandemic tech.

I am interested in game theory, population dynamics, and the ways in which game theory can inform our understanding of populations of interacting agents. My work includes mathematical models of genetic and cultural evolution, as well as of reinforcement learning within a population. I am especially interested in theoretical aspects of collective behavior (such as learning) emerging from simple interactions. I have a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of British Columbia and spent several years in Boston before joining the Center for Mathematical Biology at the University of Pennsylvania as a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow.

Fiona McCann (she/her/hers) is a second year graduate student in the Applied Math PhD program at the University of Arizona. She received her Bachelor's in Science in Applied Math with a secondary major in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is interested in new ways that math modeling can affect current research within psychology/psychiatry, biology, and ecology. With past research in modeling bipolar disorder, empathy, and cannibalism, Fiona's current research regards population dynamics via a novel approach for the lottery model.

I am a second year applied math PhD student at the University of Arizona, currently working in Dr. Joanna Masel's lab. I am primarily interested in ecology, evolution, and population genetics. My past research includes topics such as protein evolution, and the evolution of multicellularity.

Manus Patten is a teaching professor in the Department of Biology at Georgetown University. He takes a theoretical approach to studying evolutionary genetics and is especially interested in conflict, cooperation, and the levels of selection.