Philipp Messer

Philipp is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Biological Statistics at Cornell. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate in the Petrov Lab (2008-2014). He joined the lab in 2008 as a Postdoc after obtaining his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin with Peter Arndt. The focus of Philipp's research lies in understanding the role of adaptation in molecular evolution, which he addresses through theory and the analysis of population genomic data. His studies have provided diverse lines of evidence that adaptation is at times pervasive, often rapid, and frequently involves mutations of large selective effects. Philipp has shown that in many species adaptation should in fact not be limited by the availability of individual mutations, explaining why phenotypic adaptation such as the evolution of pesticide resistance can occur on surprisingly short ecological time-scales. He has also shown that rapid adaptation often proceeds in complex modes, such as soft selective sweeps or balancing selection. While in the Petrov Lab, Philipp wrote the wildly successful and influential simulation software packs SLiM (Selection with Linked Mutation). More information about Philipp's research can be found on his personal website.