Joan E. Strassmann

Who is Joan E. Strassmann?

Joan E. Strassmann is a North American evolutionary biologist who is interested in how cooperation prospers in the face of evolutionary conflicts. She received her BS from The University of Michigan in 1974 and her PhD from The University of Texas at Austin in 1979 where she was co-advised by Alan R. Templeton and Lawrence E. Gilbert. Strassmann was on the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas from 1980 until 2011 where she was Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Since 2011 she is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2011 she was also elected president of the Animal Behavior Society. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

Strassmann's work focuses on cooperative alliances that have occurred at several important steps in the evolution of life, and which have proven evolutionarily and ecologically successful. In collaboration with her husband and colleague David C. Queller, she has measured genetic relatedness within colonies of many wasp species, including Polistes exclamans, and showed that kin selection theory predicts the existence and outcome of within-family conflicts of interest. They have also pioneered the use of DNA microsatellites for relatedness estimation. In 1998 they began working with the social amoebae, Dictyostelium discoideum, a model organism for exploring the evolution of social interactions at the physiological, genetic, and genomic levels. In a series of papers they have demonstrated the power of social evolution theory in explaining multicellular organization, from developmental pathways to cell adhesion. Dr. Strassmann teaches the Behavioral Ecology course at Washington University.