Emily Dolson

About

Emily Dolson is an assistant professor in Computer Science of Engineering and core faculty in the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior program. The goal of her research is to develop an algorithmic approach to controlling the trajectory of evolution in complex ecological communities. Her lab focuses primarily on addressing this challenge via computational experiments using everything from simple models to complex artificial life systems. This work has implications for evolutionary medicine, evolutionary computation, and eco-evolutionary theory, with an emphasis on directly testing these applications via close collaboration with wet lab and field biologists.

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science & Engineering and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, & Behavior, Michigan State University, 2019
• BA, Computer Science and Biology, Swarthmore College, 2013

Selected publications

• Iram, S., Dolson, E., Chiel, J., Pelesko, J., Krishnan, N., Güngör, Ö., Kuznets-Speck, B., Deffner, S., Ilker, E., Scott, J.G. and Hinczewski, M., 2020. Controlling the speed and trajectory of evolution with counterdiabatic driving. Nature Physics.
• Dolson, E.L., Vostinar, A.E., Wiser, M.J. and Ofria, C., 2019. The MODES toolbox: Measurements of open-ended dynamics in evolving systems. Artificial life, 25(1), pp.50-73.
• Dolson, E. and Ofria, C., 2018, July. Ecological theory provides insights about evolutionary computation. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (pp. 105-106).