Dieter Ebert
Dieter Ebert is professor for Zoology and Evolutionary Biology at the Zoological Institute at the University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland. He is an evolutionary ecologist and geneticist, known for his research on host–pathogen interaction and coevolution, mainly using the model system Daphnia and its parasites.
Dieter Ebert
Research on host-parasite interactions
coevolution
Department of Environmental Sciences, Zoology, at University of Basel (Switzerland)
Jürgen Jacobs, W. D. Hamilton, John Lawton
Education and academic positions[edit]
Ebert obtained a diploma in Zoology and Ecology in 1988 from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. During his undergraduate studies he spend a year at the University of South Alabama, Alabama. He did a PhD in Evolutionary Biology in 1991 in the group of Stephen C. Stearns, at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In 1991 Ebert spent six months at the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow, Russia. This was followed by a junior research fellowship at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. In 1992 Ebert joined the research group of William (Bill) Hamilton at the University of Oxford, where he started to work on host - parasite interactions. He did a further postdoc in the NERC Centre for Population Biology (CPB) at Silwood Park with John Lawton, before he became Assistant professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In 2001 he became Full Professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, but moved back to the University of Basel in 2004.
Ebert is mostly known for his work on host - parasite coevolution. During his postdoc at Oxford University he developed the Daphnia - parasite system, as a new model for experimental studies. In particular Daphnia magna has become a model system to understand the genetics, evolution and ecology of host-parasite interaction.....[1] In natural habitats Daphnia are frequently infected with diverse microparasites,[2] and a number of these parasites can be used as models in the laboratory and the field (see section Parasitism at Daphnia magna) using observational, experimental and genomic approaches.
Work from his research group resulted in a number of important findings.
Mentoring[edit]
Ebert is known for having a high rate of placing trainees in academic positions. Previous mentees (former PhD students and postdocs) have gone on to PI positions at institutions around the world, for example Tom Little (University of Edinburgh), Christoph Haag (CNRS, Montpellier), Marco Archetti (University of East Anglia, UK & Penn State University, USA), Florian Altermatt (University of Zürich), Pepijn Luijckx (Trinity College, Dublin), Laurence Mouton (University of Lyon), Sabrina Gaba (INRA Dijon), Karen Haag (University de Rio Grande de Sol, Brazil), Frida Ben-Ami (Tel Aviv University), Mathew Hall (Monash University, Australia), Jason Andras (Mount Holyoke, USA), Anne Roulin (University of Zurich), Hirumo Ito (Nagasaki University, Japan) and Marilou Sison-Mangus (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA).
Since 2001, Dieter Ebert is the main organizer of the Guarda summer school in evolutionary biology,[17] a master class for graduate students in evolutionary biology, taking place in the remote Swiss alpine village of Guarda, Switzerland, Canton of Grisons. This summer school was launched by Stephen Stearns in 1987, and had featured an outstanding selection of evolutionary biologist on its faculty, including John Maynard Smith, Georg Williams, W. D. Hamilton, Richard Lenski and Peter and Rosemary Grant.[18]
Recognition[edit]
Dieter Ebert is a member of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina,[19] the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO),[20] and is a permanent fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study[21]