Jon Seger

Who is Jon Seger?

Jon Seger is an American evolutionary ecologist, and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Utah. His work has appeared in leading scientific journals such as Nature, Science, Genetics, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, as well as popular magazines such as Scientific American . Dr. Seger attended UC Santa Barbara for his undergraduate studies, where he received a B.A. in English, and Harvard University, where he received his PhD in Biology. Much of his early work concerned models of sex ratio evolution and a variety of social insects. This work often took the form of mathematical models built from 'first principles'. He is also the co-author of an influential article on the theory of bet-hedging.

His latest work concerns applications of coalescent theory to population genetics, particularly the mtDNA of whale lice, although members of his lab work on a variety of applied and theoretical topics that range from evolutionary ecology and genetics to mathematical biology and coalescent theory. In addition, he recently received an NSF grant to continue his work on the so-called "missing heritability" problem. His whale lice work had already shown that a genome should have lots of weakly deleterious mutations of small effect taken on their own but potentially large effect when taken together. This implies that the "missing" genes sought by, for example, human geneticists aren't actually missing: there are simply a lot more genes have a very small effect on fitness by themselves but have can have a large effect when the effects are combined.