Chris Adami

Last updated
Christoph Adami
BornAugust 30, 1962 (1962-08-30) (age 62)
Brussels, Belgium
NationalityGerman
Alma mater University of Bonn
Stony Brook University
Known forNegative quantum entropy
Digital evolution
Avida
AwardsFairchild Prize Fellowship (1992)
Caltech President's Fund Award (1996)
NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal (2002)
Fellow of the AAAS (2012) Fellow of the American Physical Society (2017)
Scientific career
Fields Evolutionary Biology and Physics
Institutions Stony Brook University

California Institute of Technology
Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Contents

Keck Graduate Institute
Michigan State University
Academic advisors Gerald E. Brown
Doctoral students Charles Ofria

Christoph Carl Herbert "Chris" Adami (born August 30, 1962) is a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, as well as professor of physics and astronomy, at Michigan State University. He is a core faculty member of the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior (EEB) Program there [1] .

Education

Adami was born in Brussels, Belgium, and graduated from the European School of Brussels I. He obtained a Diplom in physics from the University of Bonn and an MA and a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics from Stony Brook University in 1991. [2] Adami was a Division Prize Fellow in the lab of Steven E. Koonin at the California Institute of Technology from 1992-1995, and was subsequently on the Caltech faculty as a senior research associate.

Career

Before joining Michigan State University, he was a professor of Applied Life Sciences at the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California. Adami is best known for his work on Avida, an artificial life simulator used to study evolutionary biology, [3] and for applying the theory of information to physical and biological systems. Together with Nicolas J. Cerf, Adami made significant advances in the quantum theory of information in the late 1990s.

Honors

He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal while serving at JPL, and was elected a Fellow of the AAAS in 2012. [4] He was also elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society [5] in 2017. On July 31, 2019, He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by The International Society for Artificial Life. [6]

Works

Related Research Articles

A digital organism is a self-replicating computer program that mutates and evolves. Digital organisms are used as a tool to study the dynamics of Darwinian evolution, and to test or verify specific hypotheses or mathematical models of evolution. The study of digital organisms is closely related to the area of artificial life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Avida (software)</span> Artificial life software platform

Avida is an artificial life software platform to study the evolutionary biology of self-replicating and evolving computer programs. Avida is under active development by Charles Ofria's Digital Evolution Lab at Michigan State University; the first version of Avida was designed in 1993 by Ofria, Chris Adami and C. Titus Brown at Caltech, and has been fully reengineered by Ofria on multiple occasions since then. The software was originally inspired by the Tierra system.

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Lin Chao is a Chinese Brazilian–American evolutionary biologist and geneticist. He earned his PhD in 1977 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as a student of Bruce R. Levin, and was a NIH postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in the laboratory of Edward C. Cox. He spent most of his career in the Department of Biology of the University of Maryland, College Park and is currently at the Ecology, Behavior and Evolution Section of the University of California, San Diego.

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Dr. Charles A. Ofria is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, the director of the Digital Evolution (DEvo) Lab there, and Director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. He is the son of the late Charles Ofria, who developed the first fully integrated shop management program for the automotive repair industry. Ofria attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Ward Melville High School in 1991. He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science, Pure Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics from Stony Brook University in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology in 1999. Ofria's research focuses on the interplay between computer science and Darwinian evolution.

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Laura Faye Landweber is an American evolutionary biologist. As of 2016, she is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and of biological sciences at Columbia University. Previously, she was a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. She specializes in RNA-mediated epigenetic inheritance and molecular evolution.

G. Mark Voit is an American physicist and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University. His most cited solely-authored paper is "Tracing Cosmic Evolution with Clusters of Galaxies", in Reviews of Modern Physics, at Michigan State University. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research involves theoretical investigations of clusters of galaxies, galaxy evolution, and the role of supermassive black holes in galaxy evolution. Voit is an expert in the physics of astrophysical gas and dust.

Leonid Kruglyak is a scientist focusing on evolutionary genetics. He is the Chair of the Department of Human Genetics, a Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Human Genetics and Biological Chemistry and was appointed in 2020 The Diller-von Furstenberg Endowed Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles.

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Guy L. Bush (1929–2023) was an evolutionary biologist, entomologist, and John Hannah Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. He was also the first director of MSU's Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. Bush is best known for his research on the process of speciation, especially for his evidence of sympatric speciation in the apple maggot fruit fly, Rhagoletis pomonella, which shifted from using its native host, hawthorn tree, to using the domesticated apple tree in the last 150-200 years.

Donald James Hall (1935–2020) was a freshwater ecologist and Professor at Michigan State University. He was also the longest-serving director of MSU's Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior (EEB) from 1989 to 2004.

References

  1. "EEB Core Faculty". EEB Program at MSU.
  2. "Chris Adami bio". anderson.ucla.edu. Archived from the original on February 7, 2012.
  3. Adami, C. (2006). "Digital Genetics: unravelling the genetic basis of evolution". Nature Reviews Genetics. 7 (2): 109–118. doi:10.1038/nrg1771. PMID   16418746. S2CID   2677823.
  4. "MSU earns record number of AAAS Fellows". news.msu.edu. December 14, 2011.
  5. "American Physical Society Announces 2017 Fellows". www.aps.org. Retrieved October 3, 2021.
  6. "2019 ISAL Awards Winners" . Retrieved October 3, 2021.