300076 VO Beyond Networks: The Evolution of Dynamic Regulatory Systems (2018S)

This lecture takes a fresh look at the evolution of the complex regulatory systems that drive organismic development, physiology, and metabolism. In particular, it focuses on the way that the structure of such systems influence and alter the course of evolution (evolvability), and how the internal structure of organisms is interacting with environmental influences to create the phenotypic variability that natural selection can act upon.

The aim is to (1) provide the theoretical and conceptual foundations for the study of evolving systems, (2) introduce the students, in a non-technical and accessible way, to concepts from dynamical systems theory and other branches of complexity science, that are necessary to understand evolution and development at the systems level, (3) introduce students to the theory of network evolution, (4) illustrate the above theoretical concepts with numerous examples from the current research literature. The lecture will provide students with the intellectual foundation and the conceptual tools necessary to actively enter the exciting new research field of evolutionary systems biology.

The format of this lecture will be interactive and informal, to encourage active student participation.

Dr. Johannes Jäger resides at the University of Vienna as a guest lecturer from March to May 2018. He is affiliated with the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) Vienna, and recently spent time as a visiting scholar at the Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD). He is the former director of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) in Klosterneuburg. Before this, he was leading a research group at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Wiko), and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Museum of Zoology of the University of Cambridge.