Michael Lynch

Lynch is the director of the Biodesign Center for Mechanisms of Evolution, developed to understand the primary forces of evolution in order to empower all areas of the life sciences and solve key practical and urgent societal issues, such as our understanding of mutation and disease. This work relies on the integration of theory development and computational analysis with empirical work on several model systems, including the microcrustacean Daphnia, the ciliate Paramecium, and numerous microbial species. He has served as President of the Genetics Society of America, the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the American Genetic Association. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009), and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Besides many highly acclaimed papers, especially in population genetics, he has written a two volume treatise on quantitative genetics with Bruce Walsh, the first volume (1998) focused on the genetics and analysis of quantitative traits, and the second (forthcoming) on the evolution of quantitative traits. He has been a major force in promoting neutral theories to explain variation in genomic and gene-structural architecture based on the effects of population sizes in different lineages; he presented this point of view comprehensively in his 2007 book "The Origins of Genome Architecture". He is currently extending these ideas to the cellular level in an emerging book on “The Origins of Cellular Features.”