Presidential Graduate Assistantship
Interdisciplinary Principles for Managing Evolving Systems Training Program (InterPRIMES)
Overview
Evolving systems drive many of the wicked problems of the modern world, from preventing pandemics and biodiversity loss to maintaining healthy microbiomes and agriculture. Diseases like cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, and the flu all rapidly evolve in response to our therapies. This is why they are so hard to prevent and treat successfully, and why we have to get revaccinated for the flu and COVID every year. It is also why cancer has been so hard to cure. Similarly, agricultural pests and weeds evolve resistance to pesticides and herbicides. The urgent problem in many infectious diseases like malaria, MRSA and tuberculosis, is the global spread of therapeutically resistant variants that can render entire drugs useless. The standard of care in many of these fields is to use the maximum tolerated dose of a drug, but that is also the fastest way to select for therapeutic resistance. We can do better by employing evolutionary strategies to manage these evolving diseases within their ecosystems. Interestingly, conservation biologists have a similar problem, but in reverse: how can we manage the evolution of species within complex ecosystems to prevent them from going extinct?
Interdisciplinary research
In keeping with ASU’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research, we are cross-fertilizing ideas among all of the relevant fields in order to develop innovations in the way that we treat and manage these rapidly evolving systems. ASU is an ideal environment for such innovations. We host one of the only Centers for Evolution and Medicine in the world, along with the Center for Mechanisms of Evolution, the Center for Fundamental and Applied Microbiomics, the Center for Health Through Microbiomes, the Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society (which focuses on managing the evolution of malicious actors in complex adaptive systems), the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, the Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center, ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, the School of Complex Adaptive Systems, and the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
Deadline to apply: Nov. 15, 2026
Opportunities
We currently have an opportunity to support two new PhD students to work on managing evolving systems. If you are interested, please apply to any of the School of Life Sciences PhD programs and explain how and why you are interested in managing evolving systems, along with identifying faculty you would like to work with.