Axel Meyer

Axel Meyer (born August 4, 1960) is an evolutionary biologist and a professor of zoology and evolutionary biology at the Universität Konstanz, Germany. Meyer is best known for his work on the evolution and adaptive radiation of African cichlid fishes, fish-specific genome duplications, molecular phylogenetics of vertebrates, and the role of ecological and sexual selection in speciation.

Meyer (left) and Ernst Mayr in Konstanz in 1998

Meyer attended the gymnasium (high school) Katharineum in Lübeck. He was an undergraduate at the Universität Marburg (1979–1982), and completed his undergraduate thesis at the Universität Kiel and the University of Miami, Florida (1982). He received both his master's and PhD from the Department of Zoology at the University of California Berkeley in 1984 and 1988 respectively. He spent one year as a visiting student in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (1986–1987).

Meyer was an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Evolution at University of California Berkeley with Allan C. Wilson, before joining the faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook as an assistant professor. In 1993 he received tenure and was promoted to associate professor. Meyer joined the Universität Konstanz Department of Biology as a full professor in 1997.

Meyer is active in the communication of science to the public. He has written more than 45 articles for major German newspapers including Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In addition, he contributed a weekly column, Quantensprung, on matters related to science and evolution to the Handelsblatt from 2005-2010. The first 100 articles of Quantensprung were published in 2008 in the book Evolution ist überall.

Meyer is an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

He has received numerous awards including the Carus Medal from the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2009), the EMBO Award for Communication in Life Science (2008), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1996), the Young Investigator Prize from the American Society of Naturalists(1990)., and Hector Science Award 2012. His scientific work is widely cited by his peers and has been covered by national and international press and media.

"In Mrs Schwesig’s federal ministry of family affairs, 70 percent are women. And I would not like to know what percentage is lesbian."