Prof Michael Lachmann
Local Co-ordinator
Contact
Email: Michael Lachmann
Phone: +1 505 946 2780
Biosketch
Michael Lachmann is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a theoretical biologist whose primary interests lie in understanding evolutionary processes and their origins. He received his BSc at the Tel Aviv University in the interdisciplinary program for fostering excellence founded by the late Yehuda Elkana. He received his PhD in Biology at Stanford University, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, and worked at the Max Planck institute for mathematics in the sciences. Between 2004 and 2014 he was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig working, among others, on the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. Michael's work focused on the interface between evolution and information. He studied how an ant colony could make global decisions based on the information acquired by the single ants, on the connection between the fitness advantage a signal provides and the information it provides, on how costly signals in biology need to be to be believable, and on epigenetic information transfer.