Prof. Dr. Maite Wilke Berenguer

Maite Wilke Berenguer is a theoretical probabilist by training (and by heart) who has stepped into the world of probabilistic population genetics, which has since moved into the center of her research.

Probabilistic population genetics is an area where math is inspired and motivated by biological phenomena. This can on one hand lead to exciting theoretical mathematical observations and objects and on the other hand to „applied“ results that can help shed some light on questions in theoretical biology.

Currently, the Interdisciplinary Mathematics Group mainly focuses on two aspects: dormancy and coordination. Dormancy refers to the capacity of individuals in a population to enter (and exit) a „protected“ state during which reproduction is halted – think of seeds for plants or rather cysts for some amoeba. 

Coordination generally refers to the effect of evolutionary events being driven by a random environment rather than independently – an example of this is rare selection (as opposed to the classical weak selection) when selection events occur rarely, but then are of the order of magnitude of the population size. Like what might have happened to the lizards in the video below.