We are happy to welcome back Richard Gawne as Visiting Fellow to the KLI. Rick is an evolutionary developmental biologist and an alumnus of KLI. He is currently working as Curator of Natural History at the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas. At the KLI, from 1 to 30 September 2025, Richard will be working on his project titled: “Wing Size and Shape as Mechanisms of Evolvability in Lepidopteran Color Patterns.” (Click on title to read more.)

We are happy to welcome our new Visiting Fellow Ronald Planer to the KLI. Ronald is currently a Lecturer in the School of Liberal Arts at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He will be with us at the KLI from 1st Oct to 23rd Dec 2025. (Click on title to read more.)

We are pleased to welcome our new Writing-up Fellow, Sanjay Narayanaswamy, to the KLI. Sanjay is currently a PhD student at the University of Vienna in Prof. U. Technau´s lab. At the KLI, he will work on his project “Notch Coordinates Concurrent Germ Layer and Axial Polarity Self-Organization in Cnidarian Gastruloids.”

We are pleased to welcome our new Writing-Up Fellow Saudat Alishayeva to the KLI. Saudat is pursuing her PhD in the lab of Luisa F. Pallares, Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society, Tuebingen, Germany, where she is investigating the effects of environmental stresses on the evolution of complex traits in Drosophila melanogaster. She will be at the KLI from 1 September 2025 to 26 February 2026. (Click on title to read more).

We are very happy to welcome our new Fellow Visitor Sean Pears to the KLI. Sean is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Philosophy in Biology and Medicine at the University of Bordeaux, with a focus on the philosophy of biology, particularly evolutionary theory and the expanded evolutionary synthesis. He will be at the KLI for two months, from September 1 to October 31, 2024. During his time at the KLI, Sean will be working on his project titled, ‘Eco-Evo-Devo and Restoration: Cultivating Evolvable Socio-Ecosystems’.

We are very happy to welcome our new Post-doc Fellow Silvia Basanta to the KLI. Silvia completed her PhD under the guidance of Prof. Mihaela Pavlicev, and has recently been awarded a doctoral degree from the University of Vienna for her thesis titled, “The evolution of signalling in mammalian pregnancy”. Silvia has an academic background both in philosophy as well as biology. During her post-doc research at the KLI, Silvia will investigate how the female body has been portrayed in contemporary evolutionary biology. (Click on title to read more.)

We warmly welcome our new Postdoctoral Fellow Somya Mani to the KLI! Somya Mani is a theoretical biologist, and has studied evolutionary transitions in genetic, cellular and multicellular systems. She received her PhD from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, India, where she studied the evolution of the eukaryotic cell through mathematical modeling. During her postdoctoral research at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, she began to build her research on developmental evolution, and also produced the first modeling framework for the study of de novo gene birth. In general, her work involves building mathematical models to capture evolution of biological systems using tools from physics and mathematics, particularly statistics and graph theory. (Click on title to continue...)

Sultan's project "Updating the Single Evolutionary Currency" will seek to resolve the role of genetic variation in adaptive evolution from an ecoevodevo perspective.

We are very happy to welcome our new Writing-Up Fellow Wiktor Rorot to the KLI! Wiktor comes from a background in cognitive science and philosophy, and is currently a PhD student at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral School, University of Warsaw. He will be working on his project “Scale-Free Communication? An investigation of the use of the concept ‘communication’ in biology and cognitive sciences”, at the KLI from 1 Sep 2024, to 31 Mar 2025. Here’s wishing Wiktor a warm welcome and a fruitful time at the KLI. (Click on the title to read more.)

KLI Colloquium: Ron PINHASI (University of Vienna), 28 May, 5.00 pm

We interviewed our current cohort of dissertation writing-up fellows to explore the diversity of our "diversity" fellows.

KLI fellow Alejandro Villanueva Hernández talks about how he combines music- both through research and performances- with philosophy of the biological and cognitive sciences.

What is a social-ecological system? How does it connect to evolutionary theorizing? Co-organizer Tim Waring explains the backstory and hopes for the KLI working group: Evolutionary Theories for Social-Ecological Change.

KLI Colloquium: Orsolya Rita MOLNÁR (Centre for Ecology Research, Tihany), 11 February 2020, 5.00 pm.

If we want to contribute to sustainability transformations, why should we spend time theorizing? New paper by Schlüter et al. talk about theories as assemblages, spaghetti bowls, and ecologies of theories.

KLI fellow Orsolya Bajer-Molnár integrates citizen science into a research program that allows us to Document, Assess, Monitor, and Act on emerging infectious diseases.

KLI Colloquium: William BAUSMAN (University of Geneva), 22 January, 3.00 pm.

Sharon CRASNOW (Norco College) & Kristen INTEMANN (Montana State University), 11 March 2021, 5.00 pm. To join our colloquium please register with Zoom.

Gerald STEINER (Donau University Krems), 14 January 2021, 3.00 pm. To join our colloquium please register with Zoom.

We asked Alice how outreach engagement and art interweave with her life as a scientist.