Walter Fontana is Professor of Systems Biology at the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. He is a theorist and computational scientist working on fundamental problems in systems biology.
Prof. Fontana received his PhD degree in Theoretical Chemistry in 1987 from the University of Vienna, Vienna, graduating with highest honors. He is trained as a chemist, mentored in theoretical molecular biology by Peter Schuster (Vienna), educated in evolutionary biology by Leo Buss (Yale), self-taught in computer science and charmed by the social sciences through John Padgett (Chicago). He has straddled many divides and taken risks in pursuing a professional trajectory shaped by the desire for a broadly engaging cross-disciplinary environment more than by career safety. He moved from the Santa Fe Institute to Harvard Medical School in September 2004. In seeing the opportunities that quantitative thinking and technology bring to experimental biology, the Fontana Lab pursued a theoretical and an experimental agenda that were deliberately distinct from each other. Having achieved a significant experimental milestone, the lab returned to all-computational and theoretical research in 2017.