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 research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

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

sex chromosomes A sex chromosome (also referred to as an allosome, heterotypical chromosome, gonosome, heterochromosome, or idiochromosome) is a chromosome that differs from an ordinary autosome in form, size, and behavior. The human sex chromosomes, a typical ...

sexual selection Sexual selection is a mode of natural selection in which members of one biological 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 t ...

, 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 Douglas Joel Futuyma (born 24 April 1942) is an American evolutionary biologist. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York and a Research Associate on staff at t ...

, of a popular

undergraduate Undergraduate education is education conducted after secondary education and before postgraduate education. It typically includes all postsecondary programs up to the level of a bachelor's degree. For example, in the United States, an entry-lev ...

evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

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 Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1978 and a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

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 Roy ...

, 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 grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

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

American Society of Naturalists The American Society of Naturalists 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 evolution and o ...

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 (abbreviation: AAA&S) 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 ...

(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. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

(2009) * Elected member of the

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 ...

(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 Evolutionary biologists Theoretical biologists Population geneticists 21st-century American biologists 1956 births Living people