Ulrich Karl Steiner

Heisenbergfellow Ulrich K. Steiner

ulrich.steiner@fu-berlin.de

Autobiography

I am Heisenberg Fellow at the Institute of Biology at the FU-Berlin. I am interested in demographic models of age- and stage-structured populations parameterizing them with lab data from bacteria or logitudinal data of natural populations. My recent work suggests that large amounts of variability in individual fitness components might be neutral and that we are challenged by accurately detecting adaptive processes within a variety of study systems.

I did my Ph.D. in evolutionary ecology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, working on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. Thereafter I did post-doctoral research working on structured population models with S. Tuljapurkar at Stanford, USA, and then joined the Center for Interdisciplinary research at INSERM/Paris Descartes, Paris, France, to test these models using a microfuidic bacteria system. I then was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and following that joined the Max Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging at SDU, in Denmark, as Associate Professor. I have thereafter worked as a Data Scientist at the Odense University Hospital, and moved from Denmark to Berlin to lead the evolutionary demography group at the FU Berlin.