Steve Frank
Steven A. Frank is Donald Bren Professor and UCI Distinguished Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His areas of expertise are evolutionary genetics, host-parasite interactions and social evolution.
Frank received a BS in biology from the University of Michigan, master’s degrees in statistics and zoology from the University of Florida, and a PhD in biology from the University of Michigan.
Frank develops mathematical, computational, and conceptual models to study natural selection and the evolution of organismal design. His work makes testable predictions on topics ranging from microbial life history to sociality to cancer. His study of particular topics leads to syntheses of natural selection, robustness in relation to biological design, and the commonly observed patterns that emerge from information flow and scale. Current projects: (1) Microbial life history: the fundamental forces of biological design, (2) Evolution of regulatory control, and (3) Invariance and the common patterns of nature.
Frank was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995, and received prizes from the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1988 and the American Society of Naturalists in 1986.
