Thomas Flatt

Professor

Professor
Department of Biology

PER 23 bu. 1.01
Ch. Du Musée 15
1700 Fribourg
PER 23, 1.01

Biography

Thomas Flatt is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the Department of Biology at the University of Fribourg. His research interests include the genomic basis of adaptation, population genetics, and the evolution of life-history traits, including trade-offs between fitness components. Most of his current work focuses on balancing selection and the role of chromosomal inversion polymorphisms in adaptation. Thomas received his M.Sc. in Organismal Biology/Zoology (Major in Population Biology) from the University of Basel (supervised by Stephen C. Stearns) in 1999 for his work at the University of Sydney with Richard Shine, and his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Fribourg (supervised by Tadeusz J. Kawecki) in 2004. Between 2004 and 2008, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University with Marc Tatar and a visiting doctoral fellow with Neal Silverman at UMass Medical School, funded by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Roche Research Foundation. Before taking up his position in Freiburg in 2017, he was an SNF professor at the Department of Ecology and Evolution in Lausanne (2012-17), a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2012), a faculty member of the Vienna Graduate School of Population Genetics, and a permanent group leader at the Institute of Population Genetics in Vienna (2009-12). From 2018 to 2021, he held a DFG Mercator Fellowship and a visiting professorship at the University of Münster. Together with Josefa González (Barcelona), he heads the European Drosophila Population Genomics Consortium (DrosEU). He is an elected member of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation and serves on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and on several scientific advisory boards and committees.

Research and publications

Teaching and courses

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