Leif Andersson Professor of Functional Genomics
University of Uppsala, Sweden
Professor Andersson uses a genomics approach to advance our understanding of the genetic basis for phenotypic variation. He uses domestic animals as model organisms because domestication and animal breeding have caused major changes in many phenotypic traits, providing a unique opportunity to unravel the genes underlying phenotypic variation. Professor Andersson is a Fellow of the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund.
Siv Andersson Professor of Molecular Evolution
University of Uppsala, Sweden
Professor Andersson's interests include the molecular evolutionary analysis of microbial genomes, the tree of life and the origin of mitochondria. She uses alpha-proteobacteria as the main model system and she sequenced the typhus pathogen genome, the first genome to be fully sequenced in Sweden. Professor Andersson is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization and is President-Elect of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.
Peter Gärdenfors Professor of Cognitive Science
University of Lund, Sweden
Professor Gärdenfors is a philosopher whose interests include the evolution of cognition and the ability to think. He is the author of several popular and technical books on the evolution of cognition in animals, including How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2003) and The Dynamics of Thought (Springer Verlag, 2005). Professor Gärdenfors is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, Academia Europaea and the Leopoldina Deutsche Akademie für Naturforscher.
Dan-Eric Nilsson Professor of Zoology
University of Lund, Sweden
Professor Nilsson studies the evolution of vision, specialising in the visual systems of primitive animals to answer fundamental questions concerning how eyes and visual systems arose during evolution, which visual tasks appeared first, and what requirements these placed on eye structure and physiology. Professor Nilsson is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund, Academia Europaea and the Leopoldina Deutsche Akademie für Naturforscher.
Robert Trivers Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences
Rutgers University, USA
Robert Trivers is evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, most noted for proposing the theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment (1972), and parent-offspring conflict (1974). He is the author of several important books on evolutionary theory including Social Evolution (Benjamin/Cummings, 1985) and Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert L. Trivers (Evolution and Cognition Series, Oxford University Press, 2002). He was awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences.
Lewis Wolpert Emeritus Professor of Biology as applied to Medicine
University College London, UK
Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist, is well known for elaborating and championing the ideas of positional information and positional value in development: molecular signals and internal cellular responses to them that enable cells to do the right thing in the right place during embryonic development. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1990.
