Dr. Alex Lancaster, Principal Scientist

Dr. Alex K. Lancaster is an evolutionary biologist, engineer, writer and consultant.  He is a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute, a Research Affiliate at the University of Sydney,  a affiliate of the Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education and a Partner at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Amber Biology.

Dr. Lancaster received his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in Computational and Genomic Biology and has been a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, the University of Arizona and the Whitehead Institute at MIT and was faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He also received B.Sc. in physics and mathematics and a B.E. in electrical engineering and has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers.  Dr. Lancaster has over 15 years of experience in many aspects of computational and systems biology, including pioneering work in complex systems research, co-developing one of the first open-source tools for agent-based modeling, Swarm, and co-authoring a book on using Swarm with political scientist, Paul E. Johnson. He also has also worked extensively in genomics, including next-generation sequencing data and others and developed tools for clinical and population genomics,  with a particular focus on immunogenetic applications.  He has also had stints in R&D in broadcasting and information technology industries.