Rate My Professor Claus Wilke

Claus Wilke is a Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professorship in Molecular Evolution within the Department of Integrative Biology. He also serves as Professor in Statistics and Data Sciences and in the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Graduate Programs, and is the holder of the Dwight W. and Blanche Faye Reeder Centennial Fellowship in Systematic and Evolutionary Biology. Wilke obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. His research centers on computational evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, and biostatistics. Key areas include the molecular evolution of viruses, biophysical mechanisms of protein evolution, systems biology, bacterial physiology, and metabolic modeling. His fields of interest encompass genomics, genetics and development, microbial ecology, microbiomes and disease, and computational biology.

Wilke has authored nearly 200 scientific publications, several of which are highly influential. Notable papers include "Mistranslation-induced protein misfolding as a dominant constraint on coding-sequence evolution" with D.A. Drummond (Cell, 2008), "Why highly expressed proteins evolve slowly" with D.A. Drummond et al. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2005), "Evolution of digital organisms at high mutation rates leads to survival of the flattest" with J.L. Wang et al. (Nature, 2001), and "The evolutionary consequences of erroneous protein synthesis" with D.A. Drummond (Nature Reviews Genetics, 2009). In addition to his research output, Wilke published the book "Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures" (O'Reilly Media, 2019). He has developed popular R packages for data visualization, such as cowplot and ggridges, and contributed to ggplot2. His academic impact is evidenced by numerous awards, including election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2023), Fellow of the American Physical Society Division of Biological Physics (2019), Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow (2013), recognition as a Leading Texas Innovator by the Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas (2011), and the Teaching Excellence Award from the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin (2010).