Marcus Feldman

Last updated
Marcus Feldman
Born
Marcus William Feldman

(1942-11-14) 14 November 1942 (age 81)
Perth, Australia
NationalityAustralian
CitizenshipAmerican (naturalised 1994)
Alma mater
AwardsMember of the National Academy of Sciences
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Some Topics in Theoretical Population Genetics  (1969)
Doctoral advisor
Doctoral students
Website

Marcus William Feldman (born 14 November 1942) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) at Stanford University. [4] He is an Australian-born mathematician turned American theoretical biologist, best known for his mathematical evolutionary theory and computational studies in evolutionary biology, [5] [6] and for originating with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza the theory of cultural evolution.

Contents

Early life and education

Marcus Feldman was born and raised in Perth, Australia. His father Simon Feldman was an engineer, and this inspired him to take up mathematics. He studied at the University of Western Australia from where he matriculated in 1959, and graduated (with majors in mathematics and statistics) in 1964. In 1966 he obtained Master of Science degree in mathematics from Monash University. He went abroad to US to join a PhD programme at Stanford University. He earned his degree in 1969 under the supervision of Samuel Karlin in the Department of Mathematics. Karlin influenced him to pursue his research in population genetics using his computational know-how. [7]

Professional career

After a brief work at Stanford as a research assistant for Karlin, and as acting assistant professor in the Department of Biology, Feldman returned to Australia to join at La Trobe University as a lecturer of mathematics. In 1971 he was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford, and went back to US. With L.L. Cavalli-Sforza in 1973, he originated the quantitative theory of cultural evolution, initiating a research program in cultural transmission and gene-culture coevolution. His own research into human molecular evolution such as in China led him to international recognition. He is the author of more than 625 scientific papers and several books on evolution, ecology, and mathematical biology.

In addition, he is the founding editor of Theoretical Population Biology (1971–2013) and an associate editor of Genetics , Human Genetics , Annals of Human Genetics , Annals of Human Biology , and Complexity . He was the editor of The American Naturalist from 1984 to 1990. He was a member of the board of trustees at the Santa Fe Institute from 1984 to 2006. [8]

Award and honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza</span> Italian population geneticist (1922–2018)

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was an Italian geneticist. He was a population geneticist who taught at the University of Parma, the University of Pavia and then at Stanford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolutionary biology</span> Study of the processes that produced the diversity of life

Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. In a population, the genetic variations affect the phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed on to their offspring. Some examples of evolution in species over many generations are the peppered moth and flightless birds. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter Bodmer</span> German-born British human geneticist

Sir Walter Fred Bodmer is a German-born British human geneticist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. W. F. Edwards</span> British statistician and geneticist (born 1935)

Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. Edwards is regarded as one of Britain's most distinguished geneticists, and as one of the most influential mathematical geneticists in the history. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. Edwards has sometimes been called "Fisher's Edwards" to distinguish him from his brother, because he was mentored by Ronald Fisher. He has always had a high regard for Fisher's scientific contributions and has written extensively on them. To mark the Fisher centenary in 1990, Edwards proposed a commemorative Sir Ronald Fisher window be installed in the Dining Hall of Gonville & Caius College. When the window was removed in 2020, he vigorously opposed the move.

Warren John Ewens is an Australian-born mathematician who has been Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1997. He concentrates his research on the mathematical, statistical and theoretical aspects of population genetics. Ewens has worked in mathematical population genetics, computational biology, and evolutionary population genetics. He introduced Ewens's sampling formula.

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop: changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Noah Rosenberg</span> American scientist

Noah Aubrey Rosenberg is a geneticist working in evolutionary biology, mathematical phylogenetics, and population genetics, and is the Stanford Professor of Population Genetics and Society. His research focuses on mathematical modeling and statistical methods for genetics and evolution and he is the editor-in-chief of Theoretical Population Biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Masatoshi Nei</span> Japanese-American geneticist (1931–2023)

Masatoshi Nei was a Japanese-born American evolutionary biologist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Waterman</span> American mathematician

Michael Spencer Waterman is a Professor of Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), where he holds an Endowed Associates Chair in Biological Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science. He previously held positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Haussler</span> American bioinformatician

David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walter Neves</span> Brazilian biologist, archeologist, and anthropologist

Walter Alves Neves is a Brazilian biologist, archeologist, anthropologist and a retired professor from the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology of the Institute of Biosciences at the University of São Paulo. He was responsible for the study of Luzia, the oldest human skeleton on the American continent that was discovered by French archaeologist Laming-Emperaire during the 1970s, and the oldest rock inscription on the American continent, phallocentric.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Takashi Gojobori</span> Japanese molecular biologist

Takashi Gojobori is a Japanese molecular biologist, Vice-Director of the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at NIG, in Mishima, Japan. Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. He is a Professor of Bioscience and Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST.

Samuel Karlin was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.

Christopher Boyce Burge is Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jonathan Karl Pritchard is an English-born professor of genetics at Stanford University, best known for his development of the STRUCTURE algorithm for studying population structure and his work on human genetic variation and evolution. His research interests lie in the study of human evolution, in particular in understanding the association between genetic variation among human individuals and human traits.

Theoretical Population Biology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on theoretical aspects population biology in its widest sense, including mathematical modelling of populations, ecology, evolution, genetics, demography, and epidemiology. The editor-in-chief is Noah A. Rosenberg, who in January 2013 succeeded the founding editor Marcus Feldman. The journal has a partnership with the journal Genetics, exchanging manuscripts in between the two if they are a better fit of the other journal's scope.

David Benjamin Goldstein is an American human geneticist. Goldstein is founding Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, Professor of Genetics and Development and directs the genomics core of Epi4K and administrative cores of Epi4K with Dan Lowenstein and Sam Berkovic.

Keith A. Crandall is an American computational biologist, bioinformaticist, and population geneticist at George Washington University, where he is the founding director of the Computational Biology Institute, and professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.

Lee Altenberg is an American theoretical biologist. He is on the faculty of the Departments of Information and Computer Sciences and of Mathematics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is best known for his work that helped establish the evolution of evolvability and modularity in the genotype–phenotype map as areas of investigation in evolutionary biology, for moving theoretical concepts between the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary computation, and for his mathematical unification and generalization of modifier gene models for the evolution of biological information transmission, putting under a single mathematical framework the evolution of mutation rates, recombination rates, sexual reproduction rates, and dispersal rates.

Sohini Ramachandran is professor at Brown University known for her work in evolutionary biology and population genetics.

References

  1. 1 2 "Doctoral Advisor Genealogy of Marc Feldman". dynamics.org.
  2. 1 2 Marcus Feldman at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. "Doctoral Advisor Genealogy of Marc Feldman".
  4. "Marcus W. Feldman, MS, PhD". fsi.stanford.edu. Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford. Retrieved 2 September 2013.
  5. Marcus Feldman's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  6. Rosenberg, N. A.; Pritchard, J. K.; Weber, J. L.; Cann, H. M.; Kidd, K. K.; Zhivotovsky, L. A.; Feldman, M. W. (2002). "Genetic Structure of Human Populations" (PDF). Science. 298 (5602): 2381–2385. Bibcode:2002Sci...298.2381R. doi:10.1126/science.1078311. PMID   12493913. S2CID   8127224.
  7. "Marc Feldman". santafe.edu. Santa Fe Institute. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  8. "Vita: MARCUS WILLIAM FELDMAN" (PDF). www-evo.stanford.edu. Department of Biology, Stanford University. 2013. Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 June 2020. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  9. "Dan David Prize Laureates 2011". Archived from the original on 2013-09-03. Retrieved 2021-12-05.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)