Regular biography
Erol Akçay is an Instructor in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include computational biology, ecology and biodiversity, evolution, plant biology, neurobiology, behavior, and physiology. He is affiliated with the Evolution Cluster, the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, and the Social and Cultural Evolution Working Group at Penn. Akçay's work explores the evolution of complex biological and social organization, focusing on how individuals with conflicting interests evolve to cooperate across various contexts. He teaches courses such as BIOL 2610: Ecology: From Individuals to Ecosystems and BIOL 4517: Theoretical Population Biology. His research has been published in several journals, including Nature Communications, PLoS Computational Biology, and Science.