 “Lynch is extraordinarily diverse in his contributions to evolutionary biology and to biology in general…
I think he will be remembered as one of the best evolutionists of his generation.” —Curtis Lively, professor of biology, IU Bloomington |
Distinguished Professor
From his pathbreaking model of “mutational meltdown,” which
predicts how mutations in small populations drive extinction,
to his current project studying the genome of the crustacean
Daphnia pulex, biologist Michael Lynch is extraordinarily
wide-ranging both in his areas of interest and in his contributions
to science.
According to his colleagues in the IU Bloomington Department of Biology, Distinguished Professors Rudolf Raff and Jeffrey Palmer, Lynch “has had a profound and far-reaching impact on this large and diverse department in its intellectual life, its research programs, its students and its national and international reputation.”
In broad terms, Lynch’s field is evolutionary biology. He studies the mechanisms of evolution, including the evolution of genes and how mutations affect the evolutionary process. In fact, this field comprises several different areas of specialty, from quantitative genetics to evolutionary genomics, any one of which would provide ample scope for a lifetime of study. Lynch has made major contributions to all of them.
“The intellectual content of each of these bodies of work is at the highest level,” said Michael T. Clegg, Donald Bren Professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Mike Lynch has defined the future directions of his science.”
Lynch’s 1998 book, Evolution of Quantitative Traits, co-written with Bruce Walsh, is described by the University of Wisconsin’s Emeritus Professor of Genetics James Crow as “a masterpiece” that has become the standard text in the field of quantitative genetics.
In recognition of his important contributions to evolutionary biology, Lynch was elected in 2002 as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honor shared by only a handful of IU scholars. In 1998, he was named a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he has held many other positions of honor, including fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Germany.
In addition, Lynch has had exceptional success securing National Science Foundation funding for major research projects, including $5 million for a multi-university study of the Daphnia genome, which, according to Raff and Palmer, has “transformed IU Bloomington into one of the world centers in animal evolutionary genome studies.”
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