Leo Buss

Timeline

1. 1975–1979

   Three degrees at Johns Hopkins

   Born in 1953, he earns a B.A. in 1975, an M.A. in 1977 and a Ph.D. in 1979 at Johns Hopkins University.

2. 1979–1990

   Biology faculty at Yale

   He joins Yale in 1979 as an assistant professor of biology and becomes Curator of Invertebrates at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Yale promotes him to associate professor in 1984 and to full professor of biology in 1990, with an added appointment in geology and geophysics from 1988.

3. 1985–1987

   The Evolution of Individuality

   He holds a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship from 1985 to 1986. Princeton University Press publishes his book The Evolution of Individuality in 1987; it reevaluates August Weismann's model of separate somatic and germline cell lineages and treats the evolution of animal development from a cell lineage selection point of view.

4. 1989

   A MacArthur Fellowship

   The MacArthur Foundation names him a Fellow in 1989, at age 36, for synthesizing paleontology and invertebrate zoology into a new discipline in evolutionary theory. The fellowship runs from 1989 to 1994.

5. 1991–1996

   Directing Yale's biospheric institute

   From 1991 to 1996, he serves as the first director of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies. For several years he also chairs Yale's Program in Organismal Biology.

6. 1993

   Lambda-calculus artificial chemistry

   After a chance encounter with the programming language APL, he develops with Walter Fontana a lambda calculus-based theory of biological organization, producing some of the first papers on artificial chemistries. Their 1993 Santa Fe Institute working paper, "The Arrival of the Fittest", shows self-maintaining organizations arising from interacting lambda expressions in a stochastic flow reactor, without appeal to natural selection. Different boundary conditions on the reactor yield levels of organization that run from self-copying objects to self-maintaining metaorganizations.

7. 2008

   The Trichoplax genome

   He coauthors the full genome sequence of Trichoplax, a placozoan with only four body cell types, reported in Nature in August 2008 by Yale biologists and Department of Energy scientists. His lab initiates and completes the Trichoplax genome project with Yale collaborators.

8. As of October 2026

   Emeritus professor at Yale

   He retires from the Yale faculty in 2016. He is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, and Curator Emeritus of Invertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum.