Evolutionary geneticist Professor Paul Rainey will deliver the 2010 Skerman Lecture at the University of Queensland later this month.

Professor Rainey, who heads a team of researchers at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study at Albany campus, will give a lecture titled Inevitability and Evolution, arising from his groundbreaking work in experimental evolution.

He is the first New Zealand academic to give a Skerman Lecture, named after Professor Victor Skerman, who headed the University of Queensland's Department of Microbiology from 1952 to 1981. The lectures were launched in 2001.

"In this talk I will address the question of the repeatability of evolution - the notion that certain evolutionary outcomes are, in a sense, inevitable," says Professor Rainey. He will discuss "insights derived from experimental bacterial populations in which it has been possible to replay 'the tape of life'."

Professor Rainey, who is also part of the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution at Massey, will also give a plenary lecture at the Lorne Genome Conference near Melbourne prior to the February 18 Skerman Lecture in Brisbane.

Research by Professor Rainey shedding new light on the origins and genetics of adaptive traits was the cover story in last November's edition of the prestigious science journal Nature. In the same month Professor Rainey's team published research findings in the international journal Genetics showing how the constraints of history channel evolutionary trajectories.

He is also visiting professor at Stanford University in California, co-director of the Hopkins Microbiology Course, and senior adjunct researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology. He joined Massey in 2007 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.