Mark A. Kirkpatrick is a theoretical population geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He currently holds the T. S. Painter Centennial Professorship in Genetics in the Department of Integrative Biology at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public university, public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 53,082 stud ...

. His research touches on a wide variety of topics, including the evolution of sex chromosomes,

sexual selection Sexual selection is a mechanism of evolution in which members of one sex mate choice, choose mates of the other sex to mating, mate with (intersexual selection), and compete with members of the same sex for access to members of the opposite sex ...

, and

speciation Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within ...

. Kirkpatrick is the co-author, along with Douglas J. Futuyma, of a popular

undergraduate Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education, usually in a college or university. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, ...

evolution Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...

textbook. He is a member of the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

Education

Kirkpatrick earned an undergraduate degree in biology from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1978 and a Ph.D. from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

in 1983. His doctoral advisor was Montgomery Slatkin.

Research

Kirkpatrick’s research focuses on fundamental questions in theoretical evolutionary genetics. He has studied the evolution of female mating preferences from a population genetic perspective and, in addition to

Russell Lande Russell Scott Lande (born 1951) is an American evolutionary biologist and ecologist, and an International Chair Professor at Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is a fellow of the Ro ...

, formally modeled Ronald Fisher’s runaway concept of arbitrary intersexual selection and its role in speciation. Kirkpatrick has worked on questions in quantitative genetics, speciation, and chromosome evolution, focusing on the evolution of rearrangements such as inversions and fusions. He has also been actively involved in research on sex chromosome evolution and sex determination.

Notable awards

Awards received include: *

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

(1997) * Poste Rouge Fellow, National Center for Scientific Research, France (1997) *

American Society of Naturalists The American Society of Naturalists (ASN) was founded in 1883 and is one of the oldest professional societies dedicated to the biological sciences in North America. The purpose of the Society is "to advance and diffuse knowledge of organic evoluti ...

President’s Award (1998) * College of Natural Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching (2002) * Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

(2008) * Miller Visiting Professor,

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

(2009) * Elected member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

(2020)

Representative works

* * * * * * *

Bibliography

* ''Evolution'', Douglas J. Futuyma & Mark Kirkpatrick, 2017, 594 pages, Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates; 4th edition,

References

External links

UT Austin BioKirkpatrick Lab Website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kirkpatrick, Mark University of Washington alumni Harvard University alumni American evolutionary biologists American theoretical biologists Population geneticists 21st-century American biologists 1956 births Living people