Skip navigation links
Professional headshot of Emily Dolson

Emily Dolson

Assistant Professor

Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), College of Engineering

Engineering Bldg, 428 S Shaw Ln Room 3582

Biography

Emily Dolson is an assistant professor in Computer Science of Engineering and core faculty in the Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior program. The goal of her research is to develop an algorithmic approach to controlling the trajectory of evolution in complex ecological communities. Her lab focuses primarily on addressing this challenge via computational experiments using everything from simple models ... to complex artificial life systems. This work has implications for evolutionary medicine, evolutionary computation, and eco-evolutionary theory, with an emphasis on directly testing these applications via close collaboration with wet lab and field biologists.

Read More

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science & Engineering and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, & Behavior, Michigan State University, 2019

BA, Computer Science and Biology, Swarthmore College, 2013

Awards

International Society for Artificial Life Outstanding Service Award, 2019

International Society for Artificial Life Outstanding Student Research Award, 2019

Publications

Iram, S., Dolson, E., Chiel, J., Pelesko, J., Krishnan, N., Güngör, Ö., Kuznets-Speck, B., Deffner, S., Ilker, E., Scott, J.G. and Hinczewski, M., 2020. Controlling the speed and trajectory of evolution with counterdiabatic driving. Nature Physics.

Dolson, E.L., Vostinar, A.E., Wiser, M.J. and Ofria, C., 2019. The MODES toolbox: Measurements of open-ended dynamics in evolving systems. Artificial life, 25(1), pp.50-73.

Dolson, E. and Ofria, C., 2018, July. Ecological theory provides insights about evolutionary computation. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (pp. 105-106).