We want to welcome Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gadau as the head of the Molecular Evolution and Sociobiology Group at the Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity. He got his PhD at the University of Würzburg in 1997 and later worked as a Feodor-Lynen PostDoc at the University of California in Davis. After his stay abroad he habilitated in 2004 in Würzburg under Prof. Bert Hölldobler and accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at the Arizona State University in 2004 where he was an integral part of the Social Insect Research Group and Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity for 12 years. Since November Jürgen Gadau now holds the professorship for Molecular Evolutionary Biology at the IEB. He is also involved in the Münster Graduate School of Evolution (MGSE) as one of many PIs.
This is what he says about his research interests:
"We are using social (ants and bees) and solitary insects (parasitoid wasps like Nasonia) to understand the genetic basis and regulation of adaptive traits across multiple levels from gene to colony and time frames from seconds to millions of years. A major challenge for the future is to map genetic, genomic and epigenetic variation to observable phenotypic variation and understand how these traits evolve."
