Alexander Lancaster

Alexander Lancaster is a Research Affiliate with the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education, a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney, and a Partner at Amber Biology, a digital biology research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alex holds a PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and also holds degrees in physics and electrical engineering. He has worked in research and development in both Australia and the United States with a major focus on evolutionary and systems biology. He has also worked extensively in the fields of artificial life, complex adaptive systems, computational biology, and genomics. He has held research and faculty positions in academia as well as R&D positions in the broadcasting and IT industries.

Alex has published many peer-reviewed papers and is interested in solving problems in biology using evolutionary and complex systems approaches. He has done pioneering work in this area as a co-developer of the open-source agent-based modeling toolkit, Swarm, one of the first tools for large-scale modeling of collective behavior in biology and beyond.