Awards
- Distinguished Professor - 2021
- Bicentennial Medal - 2020
- National Academies - 2017
- American Association for the Advancement of Science
About Matthew Hahn
Matthew Hahn earned his B.S. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in biology from Duke University. He completed his postdoctoral work at the Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis as an NSF Interdisciplinary Informatics Postdoctoral Research Fellow. In 2005, Hahn came to Indiana University as assistant professor of biology, and informatics and computing. He was promoted to associate professor in 2010 and to professor of biology in the IUB College of Arts and Sciences and computer science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering in 2014.
Hahn's specific area of research focuses on the roles of natural selection and genetic drift in shaping nucleotide, gene family and gene expression within and between species, with a focus on model systems such as flies, mosquitoes, wild tomatoes and people. The analysis of these highly complex processes requires significant expertise in high-powered computing methods. As a computational biologist, Hahn leverages the enormous amount of genetic information now available to scientists resulting from advances in genetic sequencing technology that explores previously unanswerable questions about how organisms function and evolve. Hahn’s contributions have reshaped the fields of evolutionary and population genomics through seminal advances in the dynamics of gene duplication and gene loss, speciation, adaptation and phylogenomics.
Hahn has developed and made freely available six widely used software programs for evolutionary, population genetic, and genomic analyses. He is the author or co-author of 2 books and over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles. His work has been cited over 22,000 times with an h-index of 69. Since joining IU, he has served as the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on $17.5 million in external grant funding supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He has received an NSF CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, the Margaret Dayhoff Award from the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, the Stebbins Medal from the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, and was elected as a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hahn is currently a member of the board of directors for the Genetics Society of America, and has served as associate editor, senior editor, of editorial board member for several prestigious academic publications including Molecular Biology and Evolution, Evolution, and Genetics.
In 2020, Matthew W. Hahn was presented the Bicentennial Medal for his distinguished service to Indiana University.