About Dr Sven Bradler

Dr Sven Bradler was born in Holzminden in 1971, studied chemistry at the Technical University of Hanover after graduating from high school in 1991 and moved to the Georg August University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1993, where he has been teaching and researching ever since. The change of location was accompanied by a reorientation in terms of content, and from then on Mr Bradler devoted himself to biology with a focus on zoology: entomology. In 1999, he wrote his diploma thesis on the comparative morphology of stick insects and ghost insects at the Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Institute for Zoology and Anthropology under the supervision of Prof. Dr Rainer Willmann. Since then, the stick insects or Phasmatodea have served Mr Bradler as a model system for a broad spectrum of evolutionary biology research fields. In addition to phylogeny, systematics and taxonomy, this also includes biogeography, adaptive radiation on islands–for example on Madagascar, the Mascarene Islands, New Caledonia and New Zealand, the associated evolution of convergent forms, the diversity of reproductive strategies, the re-evolution of lost traits–for example the ability to fly and various sensory organs. Last but not least, his research interests also include palaeontology.

He is also the author of book chapters and several popular science books. From 2003 to 2009, Mr Bradler worked in the Department of Neurobiology under Prof. Dr Norbert Elsner. In his doctorate in 2006, he reconstructed the phylogeny of the Phasmatodea on the basis of anatomical features. In the years that followed, he increasingly expanded his originally purely morphological research activities to include molecular biological and now also biochemical methods, always pursuing a combination of these different approaches. After successfully completing his habilitation in 2015, Mr Bradler was awarded the venia legendi in zoology by the Georg-August University of Göttingen. He has been a member of the Göttingen University Senate since 2015. From 2018 to 2022, Mr Bradler held a Heisenberg Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG), for which he will be a review board member in the Department of Zoology in the field of animal systematics and morphology from 2024. Mr Bradler was and is co-editor of numerous specialist journals, such as "Zoologischer Anzeiger", "ZooKeys" and as Editor for Ecology and Evolution at "Scientific Reports" and "Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution". He has been on the board of the German Zoological Society (DZG) since 2017 and will be its president from 2024. Mr Bradler currently researches and teaches at the chair of Prof Dr Christoph Bleidorn (Department of Evolution and Biodiversity of Animals)–still at the University of Göttingen.