معرفی
Richard Eimer Lenski is the Hannah Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, holding joint appointments in Integrative Biology, Microbiology & Immunology, and the Ecology, Evolution & Behavior Program. Since 1988 he has directed the Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) with 12 populations of Escherichia coli that have surpassed 75 000 generations, creating an unprecedented living fossil record of adaptation. He also co-founded MSU’s BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, uniting biologists, computer scientists, engineers, and philosophers to explore real-time evolution.
Research interests center on experimental and digital evolution. Lenski uses both living microbes and self-replicating computer programs (Avida) to dissect the genetic basis of adaptation, the repeatability of evolution, the origin of novel traits, and the architecture of fitness landscapes. His group combines whole-genome sequencing, competition assays, and computational modeling to quantify how mutations interact across ecological and evolutionary timescales.
Recent publications reveal sustained fitness gains coupled with pervasive pleiotropy, the emergence of cross-feeding ecological interactions after a key citrate-using innovation, and the impact of historical contingency on antibiotic-resistance evolution. Parallel work with digital organisms demonstrates how complex traits arise through cumulative selection and how evolutionary algorithms can solve engineering problems.
Honors & Awards
- MacArthur Fellowship
- Guggenheim Fellowship
- Member, National Academy of Sciences
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Fellow, American Philosophical Society
Advising & Grants: Lenski has mentored ~30 graduate students and post-doctoral scientists who now occupy faculty positions worldwide. His research has been supported continuously by NSF, NIH, and DOE, including the flagship BEACON Science and Technology Center grant that integrates evolutionary biology with computational and engineering disciplines.
Laboratory & Resources: The Lenski lab maintains the LTEE freezer archive—an irreplaceable collection of ancestral and intermediate genotypes that enables “time-travel” assays. Facilities include robotic liquid-handling systems for high-throughput fitness assays, Illumina sequencing capacity, and dedicated computational clusters for Avida evolution experiments.
