Michael C. Whitlock

Dr. Michael C. Whitlock is a Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Whitlock has contributed extensively to theoretical and empirical population genetics. He has derived basic population genetic results about the population genetics of spatially structured populations, including the effective population size, rate of evolution due to selection, probability of fixation of beneficial and deleterious alleles, mutation load, and inbreeding depression. These results added a ubiquitous, but mainly ignored aspect of real biology to population genetics -- spatial population structure. He has also identified the pervasive influence of non-equilibrium processes in genetic spatial structure, proselytized about the limits of genetic inference, demonstrated the important limitations of toy models used in statistical genetics inference, and derived the first proper statistical treatment of QST. Using Drosophila melanogaster as a model system, he demonstrated the evolutionary effects of genetic bottlenecks on quantitative genetic variance and reproductive isolation. This analysis of changes in quantitative genetic variation with drift was at the time the largest quantitative genetics study ever done in the lab.

His lab is currently investigating a broad array of questions about how evolution is affected by generalized modes of population structure. These questions include: What is the probability of fixing an allele? What is the load due to deleterious mutations? Is this load constant across populations? How is genetic variance maintained in structured populations? Whitlock also works on many other evolutionary questions, including the effects of small population size on the evolutionary process, the evolution and measurement of phenotypic plasticity, the effect of epistatic interactions on evolutionary change, the evolution of ploidy in finite populations, effective population size, and others.