Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Corina Tarnita
2024-2025
Home institution
Princeton University, US
Country of origin (home institution)
United States
Discipline(s)
Biology; Earth, environmental and climate sciences; Social Sciences
Theme(s)
Environment, Sustainability & Biodiversity
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Corina Tarnita joined the Princeton faculty in February 2013 after completing her term as a Junior Fellow with the Harvard Society of Fellows (2010–2012). She earned her PhD in Mathematics from Harvard University and has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences.
Corina’s research focuses on understanding complex adaptive systems, which range from single cells to entire ecosystems and from human social behavior to cultural evolution. She explores how these systems originate, assemble, interact with their environment, and evolve over time. Her work addresses one of today’s most critical challenges: understanding and managing systems that display emergent patterns—behaviors or structures that arise at scales larger than their individual components—across diverse fields like biology, conservation, medicine, sociology, and politics.
Central to her research is the development of general theoretical frameworks. She combines these frameworks with empirical data to identify and catalog natural patterns. By embedding these patterns within her models, she generates predictions that are rigorously tested, often through collaborations with experimental and field-based researchers.
Research Project
Major Evolutionary Transitions: A Paradigm Shift
Major evolutionary transitions remain one of biology's “final frontiers.” However, more than a decade of comparative genomics, experimental research, and theoretical studies—spanning multicellular and eusocial transitions, as well as the transition to culture (albeit to a lesser extent)—has brought the field to the brink of a paradigm shift.
For decades, the prevailing view has been that evolution began with a simple ancestor, which could only achieve complexity after evolving cooperation and mechanisms to control cheating. This, in turn, enabled the development of division of labor, cell differentiation, functional integration, and the emergence of a new unit, individual, or superorganism.
Now, emerging evidence is challenging this long-held perspective. Across evolutionary transitions, empirical data increasingly suggest that the ancestral starting point was far more complex than previously assumed. This ancestor likely possessed a diverse life cycle, at least one group-based stage, and an inherent ability to rapidly generate additional complexity during that group stage.
Yet, a paradigm shift requires more than just evidence—it demands a conceptual framework that synthesizes these observations and outlines the critical steps leading to the emergence of the first multicellular individual or eusocial colony. Developing such a framework is the central goal of this Corina's fellowship project at the Collegium.
Research Interests:
ecosystems; human social behavior; cultural evolution;