Prof. Dr. Jochen Wolf
Lehrstuhlinhaber Evolutionsbiologie
Fakultät für Biologie
Lehrstuhlinhaber Evolutionsbiologie
Fakultät für Biologie
I studied biology at Freiburg University and completed my doctoral studies at Bielefeld
University. During my PhD, I conducted fieldwork in the Galápagos Islands, where I
investigated the social behavior of marine mammals. This experience sparked an
interest in how new species originate and adapt to changing environments. Research
stays at the University of Cologne, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in
Plön, and Uppsala University further shaped this interest, increasingly incorporating
genomic approaches to explore these evolutionary questions. I am currently Chair of
Evolutionary Biology here at LMU and research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for
Biological Intelligence.
The research in the lab focuses on the mechanisms that generate, maintain, and
eliminate biodiversity across different levels of biological organization — from genetic
and phenotypic variation between individuals, populations, and species. We mostly
work from a genetic perspective and incorporate information from other disciplines
including ecology, behavior and computer science. While our work is fundamentally
curiosity-driven, it also also inform topics in conservation biology. Current empirical
systems include natural populations of birds, amphibians, marine mammals, plant
communities, and both natural and experimental populations of fission yeast.
... you are interested in the evolutionary underpinnings of biodiversity in a rapidly
changing world ...