Michael Lynch PhD

Michael Lynch’s career as an evolutionary geneticist did not follow a straight line. With a lot of luck, hard work, and a little brazenness, each turn has taken him in a new direction. Now a distinguished professor of biology at Indiana University, he has successfully navigated the many stages of his career, including a stint as an ecologist, time spent working in the political world of Northwest salmon recovery, and his current work studying the evolution of genetic variation.

Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, Lynch is known for his work supporting neutral theories of evolution, which argue that much of genetic diversity in eukaryotes arose not because of natural selection but because the genetic machinery that cleans up mutations could not work efficiently enough in small populations to keep them out.