Thursday 12 and Friday 13 November 2009
Organised by Michael Bonsall and Brian Charlesworth FRS
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Spencer C.H Barrett FRS
Professor Barrett is Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Genetics and University Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1977 and joined the faculty at Toronto later that year. Professor Barrett's research interests concern the evolution and function of plant sexual diversity, with a particular focus on evolutionary transitions in plant reproductive systems. He combines natural history observations, comparative biology, and the tools of ecological and evolutionary genetics to address basic questions on floral and mating-system evolution. He has worked on a variety of problems in plant reproductive biology including the evolution of selfing from outcrossing, the evolution of separate sexes from combined sexes, and the function of floral design and display. In 2008 he received the Sewall Wright Award given by the American Society of Naturalists for making major contributions to the unification of the biological sciences. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1998 and the Royal Society of London in 2004.
Nick Barton FRS
Nicholas H Barton's early research was on the narrow zones of hybridization that subdivide many populations; this involved work on a variety of species, including grasshoppers, butterflies, and toads. More recently, his research has been mainly theoretical and aimed at understanding the influence of selection on complex traits, models of speciation, the evolution of sex and recombination, and the coalescent process. He has co-authored a textbook, Evolution, which aims to combine molecular and organismal aspects of the subject. He has worked at Department of Genetics, University College London (1982-1990), and at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh (1990-2008), and has recently moved to the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria.
Mike Bonsall
Mike Bonsall is in the Department of Zoology and a Fellow of St. Peter's College at the University of Oxford. He completed his degrees at Imperial College London and until the end of 2008 held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. His background is in ecology and evolution. His research focuses on understanding the temporal and spatial dynamics of coexistence at different levels of biological organisation. His group uses experimental, observational and mathematical approaches to address fundamental and applied questions in evolution and ecology. Recent research projects have included understanding the temporal and spatial dynamics of predator-prey systems, patterns and organisation in blastocyst development, the dynamics of stem-cells and the use of bacteria in insect pest management.
Dan Bradley
Dan Bradley heads the Molecular Population Genetics Lab at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Projects include detection of selection in bovine and chicken populations, elucidation of genes involved in tuberculosis susceptibility in cattle and ancient DNA studies to understand the relationship of phylogeography and domestication of cattle. Professor Bradley also has had an interest in Irish human population structure including Y chromosome diversity and Irish medieval genealogies.
Anthony Brown
Tony Brown, received his Agricultural Science degree (Honours 1) from University of Sydney, Australia in 1963. His first employment was with Colonial Sugar Company, stationed at Lautoka, Fiji as technical field officer working on the breeding and quantitative genetics of sugarcane. In 1966 he began his PhD in Genetics with Professor R W Allard, at University of California, Davis. Upon completion in 1969, he took up a Lectureship in Biology, University of York, England. He returned to Australia in 1972 to join CSIRO. In November 2006, he retired as a Chief Research Scientist in the Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research, CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra, but continues there as Honorary Research Fellow, in the Division's programs on the Systematics, Evolution and Conservation Biology of the Australian Flora. His research has been in the fields of plant population genetics, plant breeding, conservation genetics, evolution and molecular systematics. He has authored singly or jointly over 200 research papers and reviews, and one monograph (with OH Frankel and JJ Burdon) "The Conservation of Plant Biodiversity" and help edited five volumes. He has participated in plant collecting missions for wild relatives of crops, two for wild barley (Israel, Iran) and six for wild Glycine and Gossypium in many regions of Australia. He was curator of the Australian Plant Genetics Resources Centre for Indigenous wild relatives of crops. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of Bioversity International, Rome, Italy and Technical Advisor on their global project developing the scientific basis of In Situ conservation on-farm.
Brian Charlesworth
Brian Charlesworth is Professor and Head of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He obtained his PhD in genetics at Cambridge in 1969, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Richard Lewontin at the University of Chicago. He subsequently worked at the Universities of Liverpool, Sussex and Chicago, moving to Edinburgh as a Royal Society Research Professor in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His current research interests are in population genetics, molecular evolution and genome evolution. He has published over 200 research papers and two books (one co-authored with Deborah Charlesworth).
Tracey Chapman
Tracey Chapman focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying sexual competition, using mutants and other genetic approaches such as experimental evolution. She initially worked on the evolution of life histories in fruitflies during her PhD with Professor Linda Partridge at the University of Edinburgh. She then explored, during post-doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh and then University College London (UCL), the characterisation of reproductive proteins in both pest fruitflies and in a canonical model for sexual selection, the stalk eyed fly. After gaining a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at UCL she then developed her own research group focussing on the evolutionary potential of male-female interactions, characterising the molecular players in sexual arms races. She is currently a Reader at UEA, and her recent research interests are in characterising the evolution and underlying genetic basis of commonly observed sexual interactions such as male responses to their rivals. Recent research highlights are that male perception of rivals results in adaptive alterations to ejaculate transfer, increasing male fitness. Current work includes the elucidation of the genomic profiles of male-female interactions, work which is leading to new insights into the molecular basis of the battle of the sexes.
Jerry Coyne
Jerry A. Coyne is an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, where he has taught for 23 years. He obtained his B.S. degree from the College of William and Mary, and a Ph.D from Harvard University, where he studied under Richard Lewontin. After doing postdoctoral work at the University of California at Davis, Coyne took his first academic position at the University of Maryland, moving to The University of Chicago in 1986. Coyne's research is in evolutionary genetics, focusing on the origin of species. Using Drosophila as a model organism, he and his laboratory try to reconstruct the evolutionary processes involved in speciation by studying the genetic patterns these processes leave behind. He has published more than 110 scientific papers and two books, Speciation (2004; co-written with H. Allen Orr), and the trade book Why Evolution is True (2009), which was named by Newsweek as one of "Fifty Books for Our Time." Coyne has also written more than 90 pieces of journalism for publications like The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times, as well as book reviews and other scientific ephemera for Nature and Science. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1989, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2007.
Laurent Duret
My principle research interest is to understand the processes that drive genome evolution. I try to analyze the relative contribution of mutation, selection, and biased gene conversion (BGC) to the evolution of genomics landscapes. Notably, I am investigating the impact of recombination - via BGC - on the evolution of isochores in mammals. I am also interested in studying the role of gene (and genome) duplications in the evolution of new functions. For this purpose, I am working on the genome of the paramecia (Paramecium tetraurelia) that has been subject to three successive whole genome duplications.
I also have interest in the evolution of X chromosome inactivation in mammals, and I am involved in the comparative analysis of the Xist gene in various mammalian species. Finally, I am involved in the development of bioinformatics tools and databases for comparative genomics (HOVERGEN, HOGENOM, HOMOLENS).
Steven Frank, University of California Irvine
Steven Frank is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. He develops mathematical and computational models to study problems in evolutionary genetics, infectious disease, and cancer. Professor Frank has published three books: Foundations of Social Evolution (1998), Immunology and Evolution of Infectious Disease (2002), and Dynamics of Cancer: Incidence, Inheritance, and Evolution (2007). Further information about Professor Frank's research can be found on his web site at http://stevefrank.org.
Hopi Hoeskstra
Hopi received her B.A. in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley. She completed her Ph.D. in 2000 as a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington. For her dissertation work, she received the Ernst Mayr Award from the Society for Systematic Biology. She then moved to the University of Arizona as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow where she studied the genetic basis of adaptive melanism in pocket mice and was awarded the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator Prize. In 2003, she became an Assistant Professor UC San Diego and was named a Beckman Young Investigator. Then, in 2007, she moved to Harvard University, where she is a John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. She serves as an Associate Editor of Evolution, a member of Faculty of 1000, an elected Council member of the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Genetics Association, and the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.
Hopi is broadly interested in the genetic basis of adaptation and speciation in vertebrates. Her research has primarily used deer mice (genus Peromyscus) as a model to understand the ultimate (time, strength and agents of selection) and proximate (molecular, genetic and developmental mechanisms) causes of evolutionary change. To this end, she employs a variety of approaches ranging from ecological experiments in the field to molecular and developmental genetic in the laboratory to unravel the evolution of biodiversity.
Ben Kerr
Ben Kerr received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University in 2002. While at Stanford, he worked with his adviser, Marcus Feldman, on modeling the evolution of flammability in resprouting plants, the evolution of animal learning, and the evolution of altruism. The experimental component of his research began simultaneously in Brendan Bohannan's lab, where he worked with allelopathic bacteria satisfying a "rock-paper-scissors" relationship. As a graduate student, Ben initiated what has become a long-term collaboration with a philosopher of biology, Peter Godfrey-Smith. Together they worked on some philosophical issues arising in the levels of selection controversy. After leaving Stanford, he spent three years as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Minnesota. He worked with David Stephens on modeling impulsive behavior in blue jays, with Tony Dean on the evolution of cooperation within a microbial host-pathogen system and with Claudia Neuhauser on spatial dynamics within model population genetic systems. Ben joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 2005. His current efforts are split equally between experimental evolution with microbes, theoretical modeling of ecological and evolutionary processes, and philosophical work on multi-level selection. Some of the current themes from his lab include the evolution of altruism, the major transitions in evolution, the evolution of pathogen virulence, evolutionary feedback from niche construction, and adaptation in changing environments.
Wen-Hsiung Li
Wen-Hsiung Li was born on September 22, 1942, in Taiwan. He obtained a BE in engineering from Chung Yuan College of Science and Engineering in 1965 and a MS in Geophysics from National Central University, Taiwan. In 1972, he received a PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University. He did one year of postdoctoral research at University of Wisconsin. He became Assistant Professor of Population Genetics, University of Texas-Houston in 1973, Associate Professor in 1978, Professor in 1984, and Betty Wheless Trotter Professor in 1996. In 1998, he joined the University of Chicago as the George Beadle Chair Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution, and in 2004 he was awarded the newly created James Watson Chair Professor. In 2008, he assumed the directorship of Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Li first worked on the stochastic theory of population genetics. He switched to study the evolution of DNA sequences in late 1970s. He has developed many methods for comparative analysis of DNA sequences and for reconstruction of molecular phylogenies. In the 1980s and 1990s he made extensive studies on the issues of molecular clocks, male-driven evolution, and evolution of color vision genes. Since the early 1990s he has been pursuing evolutionary genomics, and evolution of duplicate genes. In recent years his research has been largely focused on the evolution of gene regulation. Li has been elected an Academician of the Academia Sinica, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received the Balzan Prize for Genetics and Evolution in 2003 and the inaugural HUGO Chen Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research in 2008.
Josephine Pemberton
Josephine Pemberton is Professor of Molecular Ecology at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She read Zoology at Oxford and then obtained her PhD at Reading. After post doctoral research at UCL and Cambridge she became a lecturer in Edinburgh in 1994. Her research interests centre on the application of molecular markers to understand ecology and evolution, particularly to derive pedigrees and to dissect quantitative genetic variation in natural populations. She most often conducts this research within the long term, individual-based studies of red deer on Rum and Soay sheep on St Kilda.
Anna Di Rienzo
Anna Di Rienzo is a Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago and a member of the Committees on Genetics, Genomics and Systems Biology, on Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacogenomics, and on Molecular Metabolism and Nutrition. She received her BS in Biological Sciences and her PhD in Medical Genetics from the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Her group is generally interested in characterizing the amount and patterns of variation at the DNA sequence level in human populations, and in elucidating the forces that shape and maintain this variation. She has combined empirical studies of sequence variation and modeling of population history to make inferences about human population size changes. In addition, her group has worked on the action of positive natural selection at specific loci and at the genome-wide level in humans. As greater attention is focused on dissecting the genetic bases of common diseases, she is interested in connecting signals of adaptations with genetic variants that influence human phenotypes and in developing evolutionary models of common diseases.
Dolph Schluter
Dolph Schluter is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Zoology Department and the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. He is an evolutionary biologist investigating the origins and maintenance of biodiversity, especially the factors causing adaptive radiation and the evolution of global biodiversity gradients.His work use field and laboratory experiments to identify the environmental factors that cause new species to form, persist, and diverge, and to identify the genetic changes that underlie divergence.
His earliest work was carried out on Darwin's famous finches in the Galápagos Islands, and currently focuses on postglacial fishes, notably threespine stickleback. Dr. Schluter is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada, and is a past President of the International Society for the Study of Evolution. His award for research include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists, and the UBC Killam Research Prize.
Paul M. Sharp
Paul M. Sharp holds the Alan Robertson Chair of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. Previously he was on the faculty of Trinity College, University of Dublin (1982-1993), and the University of Nottingham (1993-2007), and spent sabbatical leaves at the Center for Demographic and Population Genetics, University of Texas at Houston. He received his B.Sc. (1979) and Ph.D. (1982) from the University of Edinburgh. Paul has about 180 scientific publications. He was an Associate Editor of Molecular Biology and Evolution (1992-1997), and has served on the editorial boards of eight other journals. Paul has been elected to membership of the Royal Irish Academy, and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and was elected President of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution for 2008. Most of his reserach has been on molecular evolution, using computer analyses of sequence data. He has worked extensively on rates of substitution, patterns of codon usage, and phylogenetic issues, in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Programs originally developed in his lab (CLUSTAL and CODONW) have been widely used by others. In recent years he has focused on genome evolution in bacteria, and the evolution of viruses. Paul has a particular interest in the origins and evolution of HIV.
Nayoyuki Takahata
My 35 years research has been concerned with theoretical population genetics, molecular evolution, and anthropology. The research includes population genetics of mitochondrial or chloroplast genomes, formulations of the genealogical process in subdivided populations or related species, allelic genealogy under balancing selection, and DNA sequence analyses of genes, in particular major histocompatibility complex genes. I have also studied problems concerning the origin and evolution of modern humans, the demographic history, and the primate phylogeny. Recently, my students and I have been working on mammalian sex chromosomal differentiation, primate- and/or human-specifically inactivated genes, and the origin of domesticated chickens in relation to internal and external environments. I was educated in Kyoto University and given the D. Sc. from Kyushu University in 1977. I worked for the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima from 1977 through 1994 and for the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai) from 1994 to now. Since April 1, 2009, I am the president of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai).
Holly Wichman
Holly Wichman is a professor of biological sciences at the University of Idaho and cofounder of the Initiative for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies there. Her research focuses on genome organization in mammals and experimental evolution using viruses as a model system. Her work on mammalian retrotransposons is carried out in a strong phylogenetic framework and focuses on events that occurred tens of millions of years ago. In contrast, real-time evolution of viruses is used to study the patterns and predictability of adaptive evolution to novel environments. Wichman is also interested in applications of evolutionary biology to practical problems in industry, agriculture and medicine. She is a past co-organizer of the National Institutes of Health's Workshop on Evolution of Infections Disease and was a member of the committee on revising Science, Evolution and Creationism: a View from the National Academy of Sciences.
John Willis
John H. Willis is a Professor in the Biology Department at Duke University, Durham, USA. He obtained his A.B. with Honours at Brown University, Providence, USA, under the supervision of Johanna Schmitt, followed by a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, USA, with Douglas Schemske and Deborah Charlesworth as advisors. He then moved to the University of Oregon, Eugene, USA, serving first as a postdoctoral researcher with Michael Lynch and then as a faculty member, before returning to the east coast. Research in his laboratory addresses diverse topics in evolutionary and ecological genetics, especially by studying natural populations of Mimulus species. Current projects use genome mapping and sequencing in conjunction with greenhouse and field experiments to try to understand what evolutionary forces maintain quantitative genetic variation within populations, what genomic changes underlie adaptive differentiation of populations, and how populations evolve into reproductively isolated species. In order to answer these questions, his laboratory is collaborating with many other researchers to develop bioinformatics and genomic resources, including a draft whole genome annotated sequence of M. guttatus.