Professor of Life Sciences; Foundation Professor; Director, ASU Center for Evolution and Medicine Randolph M. Nesse moved to Arizona State University in 2014 to become the Founding Director of the Center for Evolutionary Medicine. He was previously a professor of Psychiatry and of Psychology at the University of Michigan where he led the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program and helped to establish one of the world’s first anxiety disorders clinics. His early research on the neuroendocrinology of anxiety evolved into studies on the evolution of aging. Those studies led to collaboration with the evolutionary biologist George Williams on the book Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine that initiated much new work in the field. Dr. Nesse is Executive Editor of The Evolution and Medicine Review and President of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health. His primary current research focus is on how selection shapes mechanisms that regulate defenses such as pain, fever, anxiety and low mood, why those responses are so often excessive, and how this knowledge can guide clinical decisions.
Closely related is his work on how runaway social selection can shape human capacities for altruism, empathy, moral passions, and complex sociality that are otherwise difficult to explain.Dr. Nesse’s main mission is to establish evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine, worldwide.
Visit Dr. Neese’s website: http://RandolphNesse.com