Ken Wolfe | |
|---|---|
 Ken Wolfe at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2017 | |
| Born | Kenneth Henry Wolfe |
| Alma mater | Trinity College Dublin (BA, PhD) |
| Awards | EMBO Member (2010)[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Comparative genomics Yeast genetics Bioinformatics[2] |
| Institutions | University College Dublin Trinity College Dublin Indiana University Bloomington[3] |
| Thesis | Rates of nucleotide substitution in higher plants and mammals (1990) |
| Doctoral advisor | Paul M. Sharp[4][5][6] |
| Other academic advisors | Jeffrey D. Palmer[7] |
| Doctoral students | |
| Website | wolfe |
Kenneth Henry Wolfe FRS MRIA[11][12] is an Irish geneticist and professor of genomic evolution at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.[13][11][14]
Wolfe was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he was awarded Bachelor of Arts degree in genetics in 1986[3] followed by a PhD in 1990[6] for research investigating synonymous substitution in vascular plants and mammals supervised by Paul M. Sharp.[4][5][6][15]
Wolfe's research focuses on comparative genomics, yeast genetics and bioinformatics.[2][16][17] Work in his laboratory investigates the evolution of eukaryotic genomes and chromosome organisation.[12] He is best known for his discovery that the genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae underwent complete genome duplication about 100 million years ago,[18] an event that is now known to be the result of hybridization between two divergent species.[12] This finding reshaped our understanding both of yeast biology, and of mechanisms of genome evolution in eukaryotes.[12] His subsequent discoveries of similar ancient genome duplications (paleopolyploidy)[19] during human evolution, and in almost all families of flowering plants, led to the realisation that whole-genome duplication is widespread.[12] His group also studies the origin and evolution of mating systems in yeasts, and the process of mating-type switching in which one cell type can change into another by moving or replacing a section of chromosome.[12]
Wolfe was a postdoctoral researcher with Jeffrey D. Palmer[7] at Indiana University Bloomington before returning to Ireland in 1992 to establish his research group in the genetics department of Trinity College Dublin,[20][3] where he remained for over 20 years. In 2013, he moved to University College Dublin's UCD School of Medicine and Conway Institute.[21] As of 2017[update] his most highly cited peer reviewed papers[2][14][16] have been published in leading scientific journals including Nature,[18][22] PNAS,[23] The Plant Cell,[19][24] Genome Research[25] and Nature Reviews Genetics.[7]
Former doctoral students from the Wolfe lab include Mario A. Fares,[4] Aoife McLysaght,[4][8][9] Estelle Proux-Wéra[4] and Cathal Seoighe.[5][10]
Wolfe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017,[12] a member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA) in 2000[11] and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2010.[1] In 2011 he served as president of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (smbe.org).[26]
