Jon Wilkins, Ph.D.

Professor Jon Wilkins is a theoretical evolutionary biologist. His undergraduate training was in Physics, and his graduate training was in Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Evolutionary Biology. He has published academic papers on the biochemistry of G-protein signaling, the population genetics of spatially structured populations, the evolution of genomic imprinting in response to intragenomic conflict, philosophy of biology, and the application of computational tools to linguistics. He also studied poetry with Jorie Graham and has published numerous poems. His collection, Transistor Rodeo, won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and was published by University of Utah Press. He was on the faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and subsequently founded the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship, a non-profit research institute dedicated to facilitating and supporting academic scholarship by independent and non-traditional scholars, which he ran for eleven years.

Professor Wilkins joined the faculty at Minerva in 2018. He has taught all four of the first-year Cornerstone courses, core and concentration courses in Computational Sciences on Statistics and Complex Systems, and concentration courses in Natural Sciences on Genetics and Statistical Mechanics. He also helps to run a poetry workshop for the Minerva community. He is passionate about the Minerva model, including the commitments to active learning and to helping students to develop the skills and perspectives they need to be global citizens of the future. But his favorite part of being a Professor is getting to spend time with the extraordinary community of students, faculty, and staff at Minerva.