Lloyd Demetrius

Infobox Scientist
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name = Lloyd Demetrius


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caption = Lloyd Demetrius
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residence = United States and Germany
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fields = Mathematician and theoretical biologist
workplaces = Max Planck Institute
Harvard University
University of California, Berkeley
alma_mater = University of Cambridge
University of Chicago
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known_for = Evolutionary entropy
Models of longevity
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awards = Guggenheim Fellowship (1979)
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Lloyd A. Demetrius is a mathematician and theoretical biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics at Berlin, Germany, and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary biology, Harvard University. He is best known for the discovery of the concept, evolutionary entropy, a statistical parameter that characterizes Darwinian fitness in models of the evolution of life history. Evolutionary entropy, an analogue of the Gibbs entropy in statistical physics, is the cornerstone of directionality theory, an analytical model of evolution, with applications to the study of longevity.

Education

He carried out his undergraduate studies in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his PhD in mathematical biology, from the University of Chicago and was then a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley.

Career

Demetrius was a faculty member in a number of mathematics departments in the USA: University of California, Berkeley; Brown University, and Rutgers University (1971–1979); and a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Goettingen (1980–1989). Since 1990, he has been with the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, first as a visiting professor (1990–1992), and then as an associate in population genetics. He has held visiting professorships at MIT, University of Paris, and was an occupant of a Chaire Municipale, a distinguished visiting professorship at the University of Grenoble. His research includes theapplication of ergodic theory and dynamical systems to the study of evolutionary processes in biology, and also the application of the methods of quantum statistics to study allometric scaling relations in cells.

ee also

* "Quantum Aspects of Life"
* Caloric restriction
* Longevity

Notes

External links

* [http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~demetriu/ Demetrius' homepage]
* [http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/11/a-new-theory-on-longevit.html Demetrius on longevity]