Meike Wittmann

Meike is a Junior Professor (similar to Assistant Professor in the US) in Theoretical Biology at Bielefeld University in Germany. While at Stanford, Meike was a CEGH Postdoctoral Fellow in the groups of Dmitri Petrov and Tadashi Fukami (2014-2015). She primarily worked on mathematical models for strong seasonally fluctuating selection at a large number of loci and on investigating how local adaptation and priority effects influence the maintenance of species diversity in a metacommunity. In the Petrov Lab her work resulted in an important paper that showed that fluctuating selection can maintain a large number of polymorphic loci in a diploid that will show fluctuation in frequency if the heterozygote’s fitness is a bit closer to the fittest homozygote in every season — the phenomenon we termed “segregation lift” as opposed to “segregation load”.  Meike is interested in theoretical ecology and evolution, especially in developing mathematical models for the interaction of ecological and evolutionary processes. She received her PhD on stochastic models for the ecology and population genetics of introduced species under the supervision of Dirk Metzler and Wilfried Gabriel at the University of Munich (LMU) in Germany in 2014.