We are thrilled to welcome the following list of outstanding scientific leaders as our GECCO 2026 keynote speakers.
Tecumseh Fitch
Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology at the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna. Webpage
Speaker Bio
Tecumseh Fitch is a cognitive biologist, and a professor and founder of the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology at the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna. Fitch studies the biology and evolution of cognition and communication in vertebrates. He has a particular interest in the evolution of language, music and speech in humans, studied from a broad comparative perspective. Current research foci include bioacoustics, vocal learning, the biology and evolution of rhythm, empirical aesthetics and comparisons of syntactic abilities in different bird and mammal species. He holds a Bachelors in Biology and a PhD in Cognitive Science, both from Brown University. After a post-doc at MIT and Harvard, he lectured at Harvard and the University of St. Andrews before moving to Vienna in 2009. He is a recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant and is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the US National Academy of Science.
Wolfgang Banzhaf
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA. Webpage
Title of the talk yet to be announced
Speaker Bio
Wolfgang Banzhaf is the John R. Koza Chair for Genetic Programming, the first endowed chair dedicated to Evolutionary Computation in the United States, and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA. His research interests are in the field of bio-inspired computing, notably evolutionary computation and complex adaptive system, and in particular genetic programming and artificial life. Formerly a professor at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany (1993-2003), Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada (2003-2016) and now Michigan State University, he is the (co-)author of more than 300 scientific contributions and 7 patents. His books and edited volumes include “Genetic Programming – An Introduction” (1998), “Linear Genetic Programming” (2007), “Artificial Chemistries” (2015) and most recently “Advances in Linear Genetic Programming” (to appear mid 2026). He served as treasurer and later chair of ACM SIGEVO, founding editor-in-chief of the SpringerNature journal ‘Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines’ and was the first editor-in-chief of the annual GECCO conference proceedings. He won the Intl. Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (now ACM SIGEVO) Senior Fellow Award in 2003, the EvoStar Award for major contributions to Evolutionary Computation in Europe in 2007 and the Intl. Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.