Prof. Tautz is involved in research in the area of molecular evolution, including population genetics, speciation, the evolution of developmental processes and comparative genomics. The main focus of his future research will be to understand the genetic basis of adaptations. On the topic of developmental processes, Prof. Tautz recently published an article in collaboration with an excellent young scientist from the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Tomislav Domazet-Lošo, Ph.D., which was published on the front page of the prestigious journal Nature.

Prof. Dietrich Tautz was born in 1957 in Gloan, near Munich. After completing studies in biology in Frankfurt and earning a doctorate at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen and EMBL in Heidelberg (1983), he spent two years pursuing postdoctoral studies in Cambridge (UK) (1983-1985) and three years at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen (1985-1988). At the University of Munich, from 1988 to 1990 he was the Group Leader of the Department of Genetics, and from 1991 to 1998 a Professor of Molecular Evolution in the Department of Zoology. From 1998 to 2007, he was a Professor of Molecular Evolution at the Institute for Genetics of the University of Cologne. In 2007, he assumed his present position as the Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology.

In his scientific career, he initiated two projects at the German Research Foundation (DFG): the Evolution of Developmental Processes and the Molecular Basis of Evolutionary Innovations, for which he was also the spokesman. In the year 2001, he was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), in 2004 a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and in 2008 a member of the Gewähltes Mitglied der Deutschen Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina. He is an associate and editor of numerous scientific publications, including Frontiers in Zoology, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Molecular Ecology, Molecular and Developmental Evolution, Trends in Genetics, Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics and Developmental Biology. He has received several awards for scientific work, including the Gerhard Hess Prize of the DFG promoting outstanding young researchers, the Philip Morris Prize for the development of a microsatellite and the De Snoo - van 't Hoogerhuys Prize for research on the evolution of developmental mechanisms. He has published approximately 200 papers, which have been cited over 14,000 times.