Thomas Flatt

Professor

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 thomas.flatt@unifr.ch
 +41 26 300 8833
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5990-1503

Professor

 

Professor
Department of Biology

PER 23 bu. 1.01
Ch. Du Musée 15
1700 Fribourg
PER 23, 1.01
+41 26 300 8833

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 experimental work at the University of Sydney supervised by Richard Shine, and his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from the University of 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 postdoctoral fellow with Neal Silverman at UMass Medical School, funded by fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Roche Research Foundation. Before taking up his position in Fribourg in 2017, he was SNSF 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 tenured 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. Between 2019 and 2023 he served as vice-head and then head of the Department of Biology at the University of Fribourg. Together with Josefa González (Barcelona), he heads the European Drosophila Population Genomics Consortium (DrosEU). He is an elected member of the SNSF National Research Council and serves on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B as well as on several scientific advisory boards and committees.

Research and publications

Teaching and courses

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