Prof. Dr. Oskar Hallatschek

Oskar Hallatschek is Assistant Professor and holds the McAdams Chair for Physics and Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

He studied physics at the University of Heidelberg and ETH Zürich. After his doctoral thesis at the Hahn-Meitner Institute Berlin under the supervision of Erwin Frey and his postdoc at Harvard University with David R. Nelson and Sharad Ramanathan, he became head of the research group “Biological Physics and Evolutionary Dynamics“ at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen. Since 2013 he works at UC Berkeley.

Oskar Hallatschek is concerned with fundamental evolutionary questions: "How fast does adaptation take place", "When in evolution does the luckiest rather than the fittest" or "How does cooperative behavior develop in stochastic nonlinear systems? To answer these questions, he tries to understand how certain phenomena in a population (e.g. random genetic migration or natural selection) arise from the stochastic behavior of individuals and their interaction.

He is a Visiting Fellow in June and July in the context of the CAS Research Group "Recreating the Origin of Life" following an invitation from Prof. Dr. Dieter Braun. On 3 July he will talk about "Emergence of Evolutionary Driving Forces in Dense Cellular Populations".