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.

Sandra is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at Ziheng Yang's lab, at University College London. Her main research interest is focused on developing and applying new methods to estimate species divergence times with molecular and morphological quantitative data. She aims to use these tools in Bayesian dating analyses when combining phylogenomic datasets with large-scale morphological datasets (with both extant and fossil species). Her ultimate goal is to ensure that all the pipelines and tools that she develops as part of the projects she is involved in are well documented, so they can be easily used to reproduce any reported results generated with them.

Dr. Christopher J. Austin's research specialization is in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science, with a particular focus on ontology, modality, and causation in the context of evolutionary developmental biology. He has written on a diverse range of topics including natural kind theory, process ontology, mechanistic explanation, information theory, structuralism, dispositional causation, persistence and identity, truthmaking theory, biological essentialism, and dynamical systems theory. He is the author of Essence In the Age of Evolution: A New Theory of Natural Kinds (Routledge), as well as a number of chapters in edited volumes including Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge) and Evolutionary Developmental Biology: A Reference Guide (Springer). His work has been published in a wide range of philosophical journals including Synthese, Analysis, The European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Biology and Philosophy, Ratio, and Metascience.

Matthieu searches for simplicity in macroscopic phenomena in theoretical ecology, often relying on ideas from statistical physics. He graduated in theoretical linguistics and physics, pursued a PhD in the latter in Paris, and explored various interfaces with economics and ecology in Incheon, Princeton and Moulis. He co-founded the interdisciplinary nonprofit Institut Natura e Teoria en Pirenèus, and is now employed as a researcher at the Plant Health Institute in Montpellier, France. His variegated experiences have left him with two major archetypes for how he thinks about intriguing phenomena in life, cognition and society: from physics, the duality and equivalence between causal (force-based) and acausal (variational) explanations; from linguistics, the separation of concerns between historical (etymological) and functional (grammatical or semantic) subfields. He hopes to use these archetypes to better understand, and formalize mathematically, the equivalences and tensions that he has encountered between various modes of scientific explanation of biological phenomena.

Gillian Barker received her training at the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Diego. She is Visiting Research Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. Dr. Barker’s research examines how the biological and social sciences deal with causal complexity, and how science can make sense of apparent normativity, intentionality, and teleology in the natural world. Her current work focuses on the distinctive features of complex adaptive systems, exploring how scientists can best grapple with these in investigating ecological resilience and evolutionary dynamics, human cognition and social behavior, and the interconnected global-scale processes upon which human societies depend. Dr. Barker is author of Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World, and co-author with Philip Kitcher of Philosophy of Science: A New Introduction.

Benjamin Bembé was born in 1972 in Munich, Germany. He studied biology and geography in Munich. His doctoral thesis he wrote 2000-2004 on the Zoological State Collection Munich on Orchid Bees of South America. From 2002-2018 he worked as an highschool teacher in the subjects of biology and geography. Since 2018 he is working as a researcher in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Morphology, Witten/Herdecke University. Special interests are the systematics and organization of insects, features of human evolution and cultural products, and issues of didactics in biology teaching. Numerous trips took him to countries in South and Central America, to Namibia, Borneo and to Egypt.