Origin and Evolution of Metazoan Cell Types

Author Biography

Andreas Hejnol is Professor and research group leader of “Comparative Developmental Biology” at the Department of Biological Sciences (BIO) in Bergen, Norway. After earning his Ph.D. in Comparative Zoology from the Free University Berlin, Germany in 2002, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Ralf Schnabel in Braunschweig and at the Kewalo Marine Laboratory in the lab of Mark Q. Martindale in Hawaii. He led a research group at the Sars Centre from 2009-2019. His research aims to understand the evolutionary origin and diversification of animal body plans, cell types, and organ systems. He is an ERC Consolidator Grant holder and received for his achievements in Evolutionary Developmental Biology and Comparative Zoology the prestigious Alexander O. Kovalevsky Medal from the St. Petersburg Society for Naturalists in 2018. Sally P. Leys is Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Victoria under George Mackie in 1996, for which she received the Canadian Society of Zoologists Cameron Award 1997. She held a Commander C Bellairs Postdoctoral Fellowship from McGill University for postdoctoral research in Barbados (1997) and then won an NSERC PDF which she took to the University Aix Marseille, France (1998) and later to the University of Queensland, Australia (1998-2000). She won an NSERC Women’s University Research Award in 2000 and was Assistant Professor (Limited Term) at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. In 2002, she was awarded a Canada Research Chair Tier II at the University of Alberta in “Evolutionary and Developmental Biology.” Her research interests broadly concern understanding the origin of multicellularity in metazoans and more specifically the cellular and molecular basis of coordination in non-bilaterian animals, sponges, ctenophores, placozoans, and cnidarians.