[7][8] Altenberg is an associate editor of the journal BioSystems, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines and Artificial Life, and on the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Task Force on Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems.
in genetics in 1980 at the University of California, Berkeley with an honors thesis advised by Glenys Thomson on the theory of frequency-dependent selection.
[10] He received his Ph.D. in biological sciences in 1985 at Stanford University with advisor Marcus W. Feldman with a dissertation that unified models of modifier gene evolution.
[14][15] Altenberg's research focuses on uncovering the mathematical relationships within the dynamics of biological evolution, and evolutionary algorithms.
His chief accomplishments have been (1) to unify the theory for the evolution of genetic systems (recombination and mutation rates) by embedding them in the space of inclusive inheritance, which includes spatial as well as cultural information, and (2) to develop the concept of the variational properties of organisms as phenomena subject to evolutionary dynamics.