Joan E. Strassmannとは 意味・読み方・使い方

Joan E. Strassmann is a evolutionary biologist who is interested in how cooperation prospers in the face of evolutionary conflicts. She received her BS from The University of Michigan in 1974, and her PhD from The University of Texas at Austin in 1979. Dr Strassmann has been on the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas since 1980, and is currently Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In July 2011 she will be moving to the Biology department at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work focuses on cooperative alliances that have occurred at several important steps in the evolution of life, and which have proven evolutionarily and ecologically successful. In collaboration with David C. Queller, she measured genetic relatedness within colonies of many wasp species, and showed that kin selection theory predicts the existence and outcome of within-family conflicts of interest. They pioneered the use of DNA microsatellites for relatedness estimation. In 1998 they began to work on Dictyostelium discoideum, a species of social amoebae where the evolution of social interactions can be explored at physiological, genetic, and genomic levels. In a series of papers they showed the power of social evolution theory in explaining multicellular organization, from developmental pathways to cell adhesion, and with collaborators have identified over a hundred cheater genes. Dictyostelium discoideum is a new model for social evolution.