Participants

Denis Walsh is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science, and Department of Ecology and evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He is a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto, and a co-Pi in the Agency in Living Systems projec, currently funded by JTF. His recent research investigates the phenomenon of agency in the natural world, and in particular its implications for the theory of 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.

Danielle Way is an Associate Professor in Biology at Western and the Director of the Biotron Experimental Climate Change Research Centre. Way specializes in understanding plant responses to rising atmospheric CO2 and warming, combining biochemistry, physiology and modeling. She is a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada, and received the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists’ C.D. Nelson Award for outstanding early career research in plant science. Way holds appointments with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Lab and Duke University, and is the Reviews Editor for Global Change Biology and the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Plant, Cell & Environment, top journals in her field. She has 81 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals such as PNAS, Nature Ecology & Evolution and Global Change Biology, resulting in >6075 citations and an h-index of 35.

Tom is an Associate Professor in Molecular Evolution at the University of Bristol, UK. His research focuses on the phylogenetics and comparative genomics of early life, particularly the deep relationships among Archaea and Bacteria and the origins of eukaryotic cells.