Renée Duckworth is an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on understanding how behavior evolves and how it influences population dynamics that ultimately shape macroevolutionary processes. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, Science Podcast, New Scientist, BioScience, Aeon and The Scientist among others. She is currently associate editor of The American Naturalist.
Walter Fontana studied biochemistry at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he graduated in theoretical chemistry. He subsequently joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as a postdoctoral fellow and continued postdoctoral work at the nearby Santa Fe Institute. Walter then returned to the University of Vienna, but relinquished tenure to follow a call back to the Santa Fe Institute on a 6-year term-limited appointment. In 1999/2000 he was a member of the Theoretical Biology Program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Walter moved to the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School shortly after its founding in 2004. His research is primarily situated at the confluence of computer science, biology, and chemistry. For a decade he also led an experimental project on aging in C. elegans. In 2019/2020 Walter held the annual chair in Informatics and Numerical Sciences at the Collège de France, Paris.
Ruth Shaw’s research focuses on evolutionary processes in wild plant populations using quantitative genetics and population biology. With collaborators, she has addressed questions concerning effects of new mutations on plant fitness, the pace of evolutionary adaptation to changing climate, and evolutionary consequences of severe fragmentation of prairie. Current research is assessing the rate of adaptation of populations to ascertain whether adaptation will suffice, over the near term, to maintain populations. Shaw was raised with five siblings near Philadelphia PA. She graduated from Oberlin College, earning her B.A. in Biology, and then earned her Ph.D. in Botany and Genetics at Duke University. After a postdoc at University of Washington, she joined the faculty at University of California, Riverside and moved to the University of Minnesota in 1993. She has served as Editor in Chief of Evolution and President of the Society for the Study of Evolution.
Günter Wagner is the Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. He is a chemical engineer by training and studied zoology and mathematics at the University of Vienna where he earned a Ph. D. in zoology. From 1985 till 1991 he was at the Department of Zoology at the University of Vienna, Austria and in 1991 joined Yale’s Department of Biology. In 1997 he became the first chair of Yale’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Since 2010 he is a member of the Yale Systems Biology Institute. His research interests include the evolution of gene regulation, the evolution of pregnancy, and the evolutionary biology of cancer and female sexuality. GPW is a Mac Arthur Fellow, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and a corresponding foreign member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.