About us

The Strassmann and Queller Group is headed by Joan Strassmann and David Queller, Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professors of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rice University. Their research focus is evolutionary biology, particularly social evolution and genetic conflicts of interest in social insects and social amoebae.

Joan Strassmann joined Rice in 1980. Her research centers upon cooperative alliances that have proven successful both evolutionarily and ecologically. She is particularly interested in how these alliances came to be, how conflicts are subsumed into cooperation, what conflicts remain and how they influence sociality. Strassmann has conducted fieldwork on social insects in Italy, Brazil, Venezuela, and Virginia.

David Queller joined Rice in 1984. He is interested in the evolution of social interactions in contexts that involve cooperation, conflict or both. He has studied wasps and stingless bees to determine the benefits of sociality, the role of genetic relatedness and the extent of conflicts within social insect societies.

Strassmann and Queller currently have turned their focus toward Dictyostelium discoideum, using well-developed genetic and genomic resources for the social amoebae to find genes involved in social interactions, and they are using those genes to test evolutionary hypotheses, such as whether social evolution is particularly rapid.

Over the past 40 years, evolutionary theories of social conflict and cooperation have radically changed our view of life. It has become clear that social evolution lies at the heart of some of the most significant transitions in evolution: the emergence of chromosomes, cells, eukaryotes, and multicellular organisms. In each, formerly separate entities overcome conflicts and merge into a greater whole. Understanding social evolution is therefore central to understanding the very structure of life. Though theories of social evolution are inherently genetic, the field has been largely removed from the advances of modern molecular genetics and large-scale genomics. The problem is that there has been no model organism with the right combination of sociality, short lifespan, and well-developed genetic and genomic tools. In the Strassmann / Queller Group we are using the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, which possesses these three characteristics, to put a molecular and mechanistic face on the processes of social evolution.