Maike Morrison

Maike is a mathematical population biologist exploring the structure of biological variation across scales. Her work draws on population genetics, ecology, and information theory to explore the stability, heterogeneity, and structure of populations such as symbiotic microbes, cancer tumors, and ancient humans. Her work at the Santa Fe Institute will synthesize descriptive and explanatory frameworks for biological variation across disciplines. 

Maike earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020, where she worked with Professors Mark Kirkpatrick and Lauren Ancel Meyers as a member of the Dean's Scholars Honors Program. In Summer 2025 she will complete a Ph.D.in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Stanford University under the supervision of Professor Noah Rosenberg, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Her doctoral research produced statistical methods and software packages to quantify ancestry variability across individuals, measure functional and taxonomic heterogeneity across microbiome samples, and synthesize the diversity of mutational signature activities within and across cancer tumors. At SFI, she looks forward to both taking these frameworks to new fields and developing new frameworks to measure and predict the structure of biological variation.