Claus Wilke
- Professor
- Integrative Biology
- Statistics and Data Sciences
- Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Graduate Programs
Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professorship in Molecular Evolution
Dwight W. and Blanche Faye Reeder Centennial Fellowship in Systematic and Evolutionary Biology
Contact Information
Biography
Claus O. Wilke holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, and he is currently the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in Molecular Evolution at The University of Texas at Austin. Wilke has published nearly 200 scientific publications covering topics in computational biology, molecular evolution, protein biochemistry, and virology. He has also authored several popular R packages used for data visualization, such as cowplot and ggridges, and he is a contributor to the package ggplot2. In 2019, Wilke published the book Fundamentals of Data Visualization, which provides a concise introduction to effectively visualizing many different types of data sets.
Personal website: https://clauswilke.com
Research
The Wilke lab carries out research in computational evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, and biostatistics. All our research is theoretical or computational, but we frequently collaborate with experimental groups. Much of our research focuses on molecular evolution, in particular on (i) the evolution of viruses and (ii) biophysical mechanisms of protein evolution. Other areas of interest are systems biology, bacterial physiology, and metabolic modeling.
Research Areas
- Evolution
- Molecular Biology or Genetics
Fields of Interest
- Genomics, Genetics and Development
- Microbial Ecology, Microbiomes and Disease
- Computational Biology
Publications
Selected Publications
- J. R. Rybarski, K. Hu, A. M. Hill, C. O. Wilke, I. J. Finkelstein (2021). Metagenomic Discovery of CRISPR-Associated Transposons. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 118:e2112279118.
- A. J. Hockenberry, C. O. Wilke (2021). BACPHLIP: Predicting bacteriophage lifestyle from conserved protein domains. PeerJ 9:e11396.
- M. Z. Tien, A. G. Meyer, D. K. Sydykova, S. J. Spielman, C. O. Wilke (2013). Maximum allowed solvent accessibilites of residues in proteins. PLOS ONE 8:e80635.
- D. A. Drummond, C. O. Wilke (2008). Mistranslation-induced protein misfolding as a dominant constraint on coding-sequence evolution. Cell 134:341–352.
- C. O. Wilke, J. L. Wang, C. Ofria, R. E. Lenski, C. Adami (2001). Evolution of digital organisms at high mutation rate leads to survival of the flattest. Nature 412:331–333.
For a complete publication list, click here.
Awards
- 2023 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- 2019 Fellow, American Physical Society (APS), Division of Biological Physics
- 2013 Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow
- 2011 Recognized as Leading Texas Innovator by The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas (TAMEST)
- 2010 Teaching Excellence Award, College of Natural Sciences, UT Austin