Mechanisms of Life History Evolution: The Genetics and Physiology of Life History Traits and Trade-Offs

This interdisciplinary volume unites evolutionary and molecular biologists from various fields (life history theory, molecular biology, developmental biology, aging, phenotypic plasticity, social behaviour, and endocrinology) who use studies of molecular mechanisms to solve fundamental questions in life history evolution in a variety of organisms.

Thomas Flatt has been a Group Leader at the Institute of Population Genetics at University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna since January 2009. His main research interest is in the biology of aging, life history evolution, and evolutionary physiology. He studied biology at the University of Basel, from where he received his M.Sc. in population biology in 1999, for work supervised by Prof. Stephen C. Stearns (Basel) and Prof. Richard Shine (Sydney). In 2004 he earned his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Fribourg (under Prof. Tadeusz Kawecki). Between 2004 and 2008 he was a postdoctoral research fellow in Prof. Marc Tatar's laboratory at Brown University (Providence, USA), sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Roche Research Foundation. He is a faculty member of the Vienna Graduate School of Population Genetics (Doktoratskolleg Populationsgenetik). He is also currently serving as a deciding editor for the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

Andreas Heyland is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph, Canada. He works primarily on the evolution and development of marine invertebrates. His interest in life history theory began as an undergraduate student in the laboratory of the late Paul I. Ward at the University of Zurich. After completing his MSc at the University of Zurich he continued as a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, exploring the mechanisms underlying metamorphosis. After a post-doc in Neuroscience he started his faculty position at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology.