Participants

Charlie Cornwallis is an Associate Professor in Biology at Lund University, Sweden. His undergraduate studies were taken in Zoology at the University of Sheffield, UK. In 2005 he obtained a PhD on mechanisms of sexual selection, also from the University of Sheffield. During this time Cornwallis also ran field expeditions and worked on projects encompassing a variety of topics from sea bird ecology in Northern Canada to conservation of giant otters in Bolivia. Following his PhD, Cornwallis moved to Oxford University to take up a Research Fellowship in Ornithology and subsequently a Browne Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College, Oxford. During this time he started working on social evolution. In 2011, Cornwallis moved to Lund to take up an Associate Professorship. Research topics of the Cornwallis group include: major transitions in evolution including multicellularity and symbiosis, the evolution of cooperation; the evolution of sexual behaviour and mating systems; speciation; phenotypic plasticity; and host-pathogen coevolution. The group uses a combination of comparative, experimental evolution and genetic analyses.

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.

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.