Christoph Adami | |
---|---|
Born | August 30, 1962 62) Brussels, Belgium | (age
Nationality | German |
Alma mater | University of Bonn Stony Brook University |
Known for | Negative quantum entropy Digital evolution Avida |
Awards | Fairchild 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 ContentsKeck Graduate InstituteMichigan 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]
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.
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.
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]
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.
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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Richard E. Lenski is an American evolutionary biologist, the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur Fellow. Lenski is best known for his still ongoing 36-year-old long-term E. coli evolution experiment, which has been instrumental in understanding the core processes of evolution, including mutation rates, clonal interference, antibiotic resistance, the evolution of novel traits, and speciation. He is also well known for his pioneering work in studying evolution digitally using self-replicating organisms called Avida.
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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Meghan Anne Duffy is an American biologist and the Susan S. Kilham Collegiate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. She focuses on the causes and consequences of parasitism in natural populations of lake populations. In 2019, she created a task force to examine factors that influence the mental health and well-being of graduate students at the University of Michigan.
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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.
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