Christoph Adami honored with Beal Outstanding Faculty Award
The Beal Award is one of the most prestigious honors given at MSU.
Christoph Adami, an MSU professor in both Microbiology, Genetics, & Immunology and Physics and Astronomy, was honored as a recipient of this year’s William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award. The honor recognizes faculty for “a comprehensive and sustained record of scholarly excellence in research and creative activities, instruction, and outreach” and is one of the most prestigious awards given at MSU.
Photo credit: Derrick Turner
“Chris has an exceptional range of scholarly interests and accomplishments,” said Victor DiRita, Rudolph Hugh Endowed Chair and MGI department chair. “His work informs our understanding of evolution, cancer biology, infectious diseases, and drug discovery. He is motivated by big questions around how information evolves and how it is mined from data. It is most fitting for Chris to be recognized with a Beal Award, named for another great MSU polymath!”
Adami’s research spans many disciplines. He applies tools from evolutionary biology, systems biology and computer science to understand how simple rules give rise to complex systems and behaviors.
“What is most remarkable about Chris is his contributions across multiple fields of science, from evolution and neuroscience to physics and artificial intelligence,” said Rich Lenski, John Hannah Distinguished Professor and University Distinguished Professor in MGI. “And it is not merely that he has contributed to each of these fields, but that he also draws deep connections that unify them based on the concepts and mathematics of information theory.”
Lenski also credits his collaboration with Adami as being pivotal in one of MSU’s major scientific successes, the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, saying that it “would never have happened without Chris’ essential contributions.”
Adami’s exceptional creativity across a variety of disciplines is demonstrated by the enormous depth and breadth of his accomplishments. He is the author of the seminal work, “Introduction to Artificial Life,” and last year he published his second book, “The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains,” which debuted as an Amazon bestseller in Information Technology.
Adami holds a patent on “Predicting Function from Sequence using Information Decomposition,” and he is the principal investigator on a related grant from a venture-capital firm: “IDSeq: A new platform to infer function from sequence based on the mathematics of information.” He has published more than 170 scientific papers, including several high-profile pieces in Nature and Science, and his works have been cited approximately 16,000 times.
Adami also has tremendous influence through his mentorship. He has advised more than 20 graduate students who work in fields including computer science, biochemistry and cancer research.
Together with Frances Arnold, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at Caltech and Nobel Laureate, Adami has also mentored two Caltech graduate students who went on to illustrious careers.
“I was sorry to lose my close interactions with this remarkable thinker when Chris moved to MSU. But I was not surprised that he has continued to do exceptional work at MSU,” said Arnold in her nomination letter. “This synergy between theory and experiment has been a powerful source of inspiration and understanding in the evolutionary community, including evolutionary design.”
Adami’s previous honors include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Artificial Life and an Exceptional Achievement Medal from NASA. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Physical Society. Last year he was awarded the CNS Outstanding Faculty Award.
“Winning this award means I am following in the footsteps of many in this department that got there before me,” said Adami. “Of course, I am delighted that the university chose to honor me in this way, but I'm also aware that this would not happen without the support I receive in this department, which is by far the most collegial department I have ever been part of.”