Dr. William Ratcliff

Seminar Title: "Exploring the origin of multicellularity in real time: what we've learned from 8,000 generations of laboratory evolution"

Dr. Ratcliff is an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the evolution of complex life. His Ph.D. training focused on the evolutionary stability of cooperation in the legume-rhizorium symbiosis, where he developed new experimental methods to study how among-organism genetic conflict arises and can be mitigated. As a postdoc, Dr. Ratcliff circumvented this constraint by creating a new approach to study the evolution of multicellularity, evolving it de novo. Since founding his own research group at Georgia Tech in 2014, Dr. Ratcliff has combined this approach with mathematical modeling and synthetic biology to examine how simple clumps of cells evolve into multicellular organisms. His lab’s research has shown how classical constraints in the origin of multicellularity –e.g., the origin of life cycles, multicellular development, cellular differentiation, and cellular interdependence– can be solved by Darwinian evolution.