Ralf J. Sommer

Ralf J. Sommer did his undergraduate work in biology at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule in Aachen, Germany, before moving to pursue graduate studies in the University of Tübingen and Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, where he earned his Ph. D. in 1992. After a short term as a research assistant at the same university, he spent a two-year EMBO research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (USA), working in Paul W. Sternberg's lab. He returned to Germany in 1995, as a young investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, becoming Scientific Member and Director of the Department for Evolutionary Biology in 1999, and serving as Executive Director of the Institute from 2001-2003 and 2013-2015. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals and several international scientific advisory boards. His research program focuses on evolutionary analysis of developmental processes and mechanisms and has identified developmental systems drift as general principle for the evolution of development. More recent studies focus on the evolution of novelty and developmental plasticity, revealing how a novel predatory feeding behavior in nematodes is regulated by developmental switch genes and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms involving chromatin remodeling, splicing and small RNAs.

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