Gerd Müller (theoretical biologist)

Gerd B. Müller (born April 17, 1953 in Salzburg, Austria) is professor at the University of Vienna where he heads the Department of Theoretical Biology and is speaker of the Center for Organismal Systems Biology. His research interests focus on evolutionary innovation, evo-devo theory, and the extension of the Evolutionary Synthesis. He is also concerned with the development of micro-CT based quantitative tools in developmental biology.

Müller received an M.D. in 1979 and a Ph.D. in zoology in 1985, both from the University of Vienna. He has been a sabbatical fellow at the Department of Developmental Biology, Dalhousie University, Canada (1988) and a visiting scholar at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (1988–89). He is a founding member of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria, of which he is chairman since 1998. Müller is on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including Biological Theory where he serves as an Associate Editor. He is also editor (together with Günter Wagner and Werner Callebaut) of the Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology, a book series devoted to theoretical developments in the biosciences, published by MIT Press.

With the cell and developmental biologist Stuart Newman, Müller co-edited the book Origination of Organismal Form (MIT Press, 2003). This book on evolutionary developmental biology is a collection of papers on generative mechanisms that were plausibly involved in the origination of disparate body forms during the Ediacaran and early Cambrian periods. Particular attention is given to epigenetic factors, such as physical determinants and environmental parameters, that may have led to the spontaneous emergence of bodyplans and organ forms during a period when multicellular organisms had relatively plastic morphologies. Natural selection acting on variant genotypes is suggested to have then "locked in" these body plans.

Edited books

Selected articles

See also

External links