He currently holds the T. S. Painter Centennial Professorship in Genetics in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin.
[1] His research touches on a wide variety of topics, including the evolution of sex chromosomes, sexual selection, and speciation.
Kirkpatrick is the co-author, along with Douglas J. Futuyma, of a popular undergraduate evolution textbook.
Kirkpatrick’s research focuses on fundamental questions in theoretical evolutionary genetics.
He has studied the evolution of female mating preferences from a population genetic perspective and, in addition to Russell Lande, formally modeled Ronald Fisher’s runaway concept of arbitrary intersexual selection and its role in speciation.