Prof. Dr. Meike Wittmann

Meike Wittmann leads the research group "Theoretical Biology" at the Faculty of Biology. She joined Bielefeld University as a junior professor in 2017 and is a tenured professor since 2023. Together with her team she builds mathematical models and computer simulations to better understand the causes and consequences of individual variation for populations in a changing world.

She studied Biology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), where she obtained a Bachelor in Biology in 2008 and a Master in Ecology, Evolution and Systematics (EES) in 2010. As part of her studies, she also spent a year as a visiting student in the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

For her PhD in Biology, which she obtained in 2014 also from the LMU München, Meike Wittmann investigated stochastic models for the ecology and population genetics of introduced species under the supervision of Dirk Metzler and Wilfried Gabriel (funded by a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). After the PhD, she won a Postdoctoral fellowship from the Center for Computational, Evolutionary, and Human Genomics (CEHG) at Stanford, USA, and worked from 2014 to 2015 in the groups of of Tadashi Fukami and Dmitri Petrov on models in community ecology and population genetics. Then, with a two-year Lise-Meitner postdoctoral grant by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF), she went to the University of Vienna, Austria, to work together with Joachim Hermisson on the genetic footprints of fluctuating balancing selection.

Meike Wittmann is part of the CRC Transregio "A Novel Synthesis of Individualisation across Behaviour, Ecology and Evolution: Niche Choice, Niche Conformance, Niche Construction", the research unit FOR 3000 on the "Ecology and Evolution of intraspecific chemodiversity of plants", the research consortium "Individualisation in Changing Environments" (InChangE) and the Joint Institute for Individualisation in a Changing Environment (JICE). She is also an associate editor at the journal Oikos.