Meyer is best known for his work on the evolution and adaptive radiation of African cichlid fishes,[1][2] fish-specific genome duplications,[3][4] molecular phylogenetics of vertebrates,[5][6] and the role of ecological and sexual selection in speciation.
Meyer was an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Molecular Evolution at University of California Berkeley with Allan C. Wilson, before joining the faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook as an assistant professor.
He has written more than 70 articles for major German newspapers including Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Axel Meyer receives the award in recognition of his continuous endeavour to convey complex scientific topics to the general public in an accessible and thought-provoking manner.
'"[29] The report was also criticized, as the job advertisements in question were placed in accordance to common practice and signed by the rectorate, and because the commission also did not speak to any of the 16 complainants before affirming their accusations.
According to Science, the internal commission reported that "Meyer claimed ownership of other people's intellectual property".
"[31] In 2015, Axel Meyer wrote an article for FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) describing German university students as lazy and dishonest.
[32] Despite a long history of publicly funded post secondary education in Germany, Meyer argued that the tuition-free education system made today's students spoiled and entitled compared to those in the United States[32] – though the US faces increasingly high rates of student debt.
[32] Though the police also reported that several offices had been compromised for the purpose of stealing cash and no evidence suggested the culprit was a student.
[36] He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers in disciplines ranging from zoology, phylogenetics, evolutionary developmental biology, to molecular evolution and comparative genomics, including a 1989 PCR protocol that is a citation classic.