Dr Richard Watson, associate professor of Electronics and Computer Science and the Institute for Life Sciences will participate in the world’s largest project to expand and update our understanding of evolutionary biology.
Dr Watson is part of an international multi-disciplinary team of 50 world-renowned experts, from eight institutions in the United States, Great Britain and Sweden.
The £7.7m project is supported by a £5.7m grant from the John Templeton Foundation, an organisation promoting the advancement of science and philosophy, with a further £2m contributed by the participating institutions.
The collaboration seeks to expand the theory of evolution with new perspectives on the relationships between genes, organism, and environment. It centres on the ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ (EES) – a new way to think about evolutionary biology aimed at tackling some of its toughest problems. The EES does not replace traditional thinking, but deployed alongside it, aims to stimulate new research within evolutionary biology.
You can read the full press release on the University of Southampton website.