Dr Richard A. Watson

Interests: artificial life, baldwin effect, coevolution, collective robotics, epigenetics, evolution, evolutionary algorithms, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, evolutionary robotics, genetic algorithms, life sciences interface, major evolutionary transitions, modularity, multi-objective optimisation, pareto coevolution, population genetics, sexual recombination, symbiosis, tea drinking

Richard A. Watson is a senior lecturer in the natural systems research group at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. He received his BA in AI from the University of Sussex in 1990 and then worked in industry for about five years. Returning to academia, he chose Sussex again for an MSc in knowledge-based systems, where he was introduced to evolutionary modeling. His PhD in computer science at Brandeis University (2002) resulted in 22 publications and a dissertation addressing the algorithmic concepts underlying the major transitions in evolution. A postdoctoral position at Harvard University’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology provided training to complement his computer science background. He now has over 35 journal and conference publications on topics spanning artificial life, robotics, evolutionary computation, and computational biology. At Southampton, he’s building his research programme and leading preparation of a new MSc in complexity science. He is the author of Compositional Evolution: The Impact of Sex, Symbiosis, and Modularity on the Gradualist Framework of Evolution (MIT Press, 2006). Contact him at raw@ecs.soton.ac.uk.

PhD "Compositional Evolution" Brandeis University 2002
MSc "Knowledge Based Systems" Sussex University 1996
BA "Computing with Artificial Intelligence" Sussex University 1990