Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation

Speaker Details

Martin A. Nowak is Professor of Biology and of Mathematics at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Dr Nowak works on the mathematical description of evolutionary processes including the evolution of cooperation and human language, the dynamics of virus infections and human cancer. His major discoveries include: the mechanism of HIV disease progression (1991), the first mathematical approach for studying the evolution of human language (1999-2002), evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations and the 1/3 rule (2004), evolutionary graph theory (2005), the first quantification of the in vivo kinetics of a human cancer (2005), five rules for the evolution of cooperation (2006), the dynamics of language regularization (2007) and “winners don’t punish” (2008). At the moment Dr Nowak is working on ‘prelife’, which is a formal approach to study the origin of evolution.
An Austrian by birth, he studied biochemistry and mathematics at the University of Vienna with Peter Schuster and Karl Sigmund. He received his Ph.D. sub auspiciis praesidentis in 1989. He went on to the University of Oxford as an Erwin Schrodinger Scholar. Dr. Nowak became head of the mathematical biology group in Oxford in 1995 and Professor of Mathematical Biology in 1997. A year later he moved to Princeton to establish the first program in theoretical biology at the Institute for Advanced Study. He accepted his present position at Harvard University in 2003.
A corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Nowak is the author of more than 290 papers published in scientific journals. His latest book, Evolutionary Dynamics, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2006, provides an overview of the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems.

Date:
Speakers:
Martin Nowak
Affiliation:
Harvard, Director Program for Evolutionary Dynamics