Günter Wagner is Alison Richard Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, Research Professor (retd.) at Yale Systems Biology Institute, Adjunct Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Wayne State University and Univ. Dozent, Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Vienna.

The focus of Prof. Wagner's work is on the evolution of complex characters. His research utilizes both the theoretical tools of population genetics as well as experimental approaches in evolutionary developmental biology. Wagner has contributed substantially to the current understanding of evolvability of complex organisms, the origin of novel characters, and modularity.

During his graduate study at the University of Vienna, Austria, Prof. Wagner worked with the Viennese zoologist Rupert Riedl and the theoretical chemist Peter Schuster, and finished his PhD in theoretical population genetics in 1979. After postdoctoral research fellowships at Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen and Tübingen, as well as at the University of Göttingen, he began his academic career as assistant professor in the Theoretical Biology Department of the University of Vienna in 1985. In 1991, he moved to Yale University as a full professor of biology and has served as the first chair of Yale's Department of Ecology and Evolution from 1997 to 2002 and then from 2005 to 2008.

Prof. Wagner is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the prestigious MacArthur Prize in 1992, and the Humboldt Prize in 2007. He received nominations as Gomperz Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley 1993; Koopmans Distinguished Lecturer, IIASA Vienna 1995; Sewall Wright Speaker, University of Chicago, IL, 1996. He is also a corresponding Member of Austrian Academy of Sciences (1997), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1997), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.