Real and Not Just Hopeful Monsters: Evolution by Very Large Jumps
- Speaker
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Dmitri Petrov, Ph.D.Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of Biology, Stanford University
The 2025 lecture series in biology is “Mechanisms of Evolution.” Evolution drove the incredible diversity of life on our planet. In this series, scientists will explore the underlying mechanisms that drive evolutionary change. Topics will include evolutionary adaptation, speciation, the dynamics of host-microbe interactions and more. By examining a wide range of organisms, these lectures will provide insights into how evolutionary processes have produced the complex web of life we see today.
2025 Lecture Series Themes
Biology: Mechanisms of Evolution
Mathematics and Computer Science: Discovering Mathematics Through Computers
Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite those interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Evolution is often thought to be slow, proceeding through the accumulation of a very large number of very small steps. This is partly due to theoretical expectations that making significant and adaptive changes in already well-adapted organisms should be hard. However, there is now abundant empirical evidence that large-effect adaptive mutations are common and appear in a range of biological systems.
In this Presidential Lecture, Dmitri Petrov will discuss his group’s studies on the nature of these large-effect mutations. He will present a hypothesis that the evolution of phenotypic plasticity and environmental regulation creates functional systems capable of large adaptive shifts.
About the Speaker
Petrov was born in Russia, where he earned his undergraduate degree in physics and biology. He received his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology under the guidance of Richard Lewontin and Daniel Hartl from Harvard University in 1997. He was a junior fellow at Harvard from 1997 to 2000 before starting his own lab at Stanford University in 2000, where he is now a Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of Biology. The Petrov Lab focuses on understanding the process of rapid adaptation from standing genetic variation and de novo mutation in a range of systems and ecological contexts, including experimental evolution in yeast, studies of seasonal adaptation in flies, cancer in vertebrates, and eco-evolutionary dynamics of large mammals in the African savanna.