LATEST NEWS

SSE Council is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, Dr. Naomi Pierce!

Naomi Pierce is the Hessel Professor of Biology and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Her work focuses on the evolution of species interactions, and features a broad range of taxa, including plants, microbes, fungi, and many insect species, especially those that associate symbiotically with ants. Her research combines field work (mainly in Asia, Australia, and Kenya) with laboratory analysis. To make sense of behavioral and ecological information, Pierce has long championed an evolutionary approach, and has accordingly been a core contributor to attempts to reconstruct the phylogeny of major groups of insects, including ants, bees and butterflies. This research has been facilitated by the extensive collections held at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, including tens of thousands of specimens that Pierce and her students have deposited there as part of their work.  Her approach is characterized by an old-fashioned appreciation of natural history analyzed using state-of-the-art molecular and ecological tools. Over her long teaching career at Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard, Pierce has mentored and trained hundreds of undergraduates, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world.

Dr. Pierce will present her work in the Lifetime Achievement Award talk at the 2026 Evolution meeting. 

The Education and Outreach Committee is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Small Grants for Local and Regional Outreach. These grants provide funding for public lectures, exhibits, student competitions, professional development events for teachers, and other outreach programs around the world. This year’s recipients are:

Melissa DeBiasse, Radford University: Salamander Evolution Trading Card Game

Nathaniel Sharp, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Velma Hamilton Middle School (VHMS) yeast evolution

Tim Hartelt, University of Kassel: Evolution in upper secondary education: A professional development event for biology

Florencia Soteras, CONICET-National University of Córdoba: “EvoJuego”: a board game for learning about evolutionary ecology

Javad Meghrazi, The University of British Columbia: Fostering evolution and ecology education in Iran by providing mentorship opportunities for undergraduate students (The Zistyar Program)

Gyaneshwer Chauby, Banaras Hindu University: Teaching the recent knowledge on Human Evolution to Middle-High School (6-12) students

Congratulations to the two recipients of the 2025 SSE Presidents’ Award for Outstanding Dissertation Paper, Chase Brownstein and Jorja Burch! Continue reading for more about each of the winning papers.

The genomic signatures of evolutionary stasis 
Chase D Brownstein, Daniel J MacGuigan, Daemin Kim, Oliver Orr, Liandong Yang, Solomon R David, Brian Kreiser, & Thomas J Near
Evolution, Volume 78, Issue 5: https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpae028

In this study, Brownstein and co-authors demonstrate that molecular evolution rates serve as reliable indicators of evolutionary stasis in jawed vertebrate lineages. The study provides crucial insights into the biological mechanisms underlying "living fossils,” species characterized by remarkably low rates of lineage diversification and phenotypic change over time. One of the study’s most significant findings is the direct relationship between molecular evolution rates and the development of hybrid incompatibility. Notably, the study demonstrates that freshwater gar fish lineages can produce viable and fit hybrids despite sharing common ancestry over 100 million years ago – the most ancient divergence time among parental species among multicellular eukaryotic species capable of producing viable hybrids. 

Read the full Open Access article.
 

Wright was right: leveraging old data and new methods to illustrate the critical role of epistasis in genetics and evolution
Jorja Burch, Maximos Chin, Brian E Fontenot, Sabyasachi Mandal, Thomas D McKnight, Jeffery P Demuth, & Heath Blackmon
Evolution, Volume 78, Issue 4: https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpae003 

In this study, Burch and co-authors address one of the foundational questions in genetics and evolutionary biology: the relative importance of additive versus epistatic genetic architectures in shaping phenotypic divergence. Drawing on 1,606 datasets from both plants and animals, this project is the largest of its kind to use a uniform analysis pipeline (information-theoretic, model-averaged LCA). The included datasets span 65 genera and multiple trait classes (life-history vs. morphological). This taxonomic diversity allowed the study to detect broad patterns—for instance, the higher epistatic contribution in animals than in plants and a stronger role for epistasis in life-history traits. The findings have direct relevance for applied fields such as conservation genetics and agriculture, and emphasize that epistatic architectures are crucial in contexts such as domestication, breeding design, and understanding complex diseases.

Read the full Open Access article.

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2025 R. C. Lewontin Early Awards! These grants are part of the SSE Graduate Research Excellence Grants and provide up to $2,500 in research funds to students in the beginning of their Master’s or PhD. This year’s recipients are:

Savanna Brown, University of Connecticut. Advisor: Elizabeth Jockusch
Meridia Jane Bryant, Cornell University. Advisor: Ben Sandkam
Sivaraj Gangothri, University of California Riverside. Advisor: Kate Ostevik
Daniela Garcia Cobos, Richard Gilder Graduate School/ American Museum of Natural History. Advisor: Frank Burbrink
Miranda Gibson, University of Alabama. Advisor: Benjamin Titus
Dheeraj Halali, University of Cambridge. Advisor: Chris Jiggins
Isabela Hernandez Rodriguez, Yale University. Advisor: Martha Muñoz
Joaquin Lopez Jr., University of California, Irvine. Advisor: Maria Rebolleda-Gomez
Kailey McCain, University of South Florida. Advisor: Lynn Martin
Austin Nguyen, University of Kansas. Advisor: Kelly Matsunaga
Nemo Robles, Stanford University. Advisor: Molly Schumer
Adam Rosso, University of Texas at Arlington. Advisor: Matthew Fujita
Logan Scott, University of Georgia. Advisor: Andrea Sweigart
Julia Soares Parreiras, Cornell University. Advisor: Molly Womack
Walker Stanton, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. Advisor: Jacinta Beehner
Pei-Wei Sun, Yale University. Advisor: Jenn Coughlan
Ravi Timsina, Illinois State University. Advisor: Ben Sadd
Juan D. Vásquez-Restrepo, Princeton University. Advisor: Tiago Simões
Zachary Vegso, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Advisor: Benjamin Fitzpatrick
Olivia Weaver, University of Louisville. Advisor: Alycia Lackey

Congratulations to this year’s finalists for the W. D. Hamilton Award! Finalists will present research from their PhD work during the Hamilton Award Symposium during the virtual portion of the Evolution 2025 meeting on Thursday, May 29 from 1:30 PM to 7:30 PM Eastern (GMT-4). The symposium is open to all meeting registrants. 

The 2025 finalists are: Meaghan Clark, Dylan DeBaun, Devon DeRaad, Simon Innes, Josh Knecht, Kip Lacy, Gina Lamka, Prothama Manna, Gemma Martinez-Redondo, David Peede, Gabriel Preising, Jeremy Summers, David Tian, Matthew Treaster, and Amanda Vieira da Silva.

The Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), on behalf of the Joint ASN/SSB/SSE council, seeks one or two members of one or more of our societies to help plan and run our annual scientific conference – the Evolution meetings. The meetings are coordinated by one or more Chief Meeting Officers (CMOs), academics who oversee all aspects of the meeting and who are responsible for final decisions about schedules, activities and venues, in consultation with a tri-society Joint Meeting Committee (JMC) and the larger ASN/SSB/SSE Joint Council. The CMOs also act as the principal liaisons with a Professional Conference Organizer (PCO), whose responsibilities include executing the logistics of conference management, interactions with vendors and service providers, and helping identify and negotiate contracts with future meeting venues. 

Learn more about the duties, stipend, and how to apply. Review of applications begins June 6, 2025.

GSAC is excited to host a one-month virtual networking event from mid-May to mid-June in MentorCity. This program is designed to connect Evolution 2025 attendees with peers and experienced mentors in the field of evolutionary biology. Whether you're a student, postdoc, or early-career professional, this program provides an opportunity for mentorship, professional development, and networking.

Program Highlights:

• Peer Mentorship: Connect with multiple mentors or mentees for collaborative learning and support.
  
  
• Diverse Perspectives: Interact with mentors and mentees from diverse backgrounds and professional fields, ensuring that you’re gaining insights from people with different backgrounds and experiences.
  
  
• Professional Development: Access resources with leaders in evolutionary biology, focusing on career paths, academic training, and advances in the field. Build your own career goals.

Whether you are willing to serve as a mentor to offer valuable insights, or a mentee that is interested in receiving guidance, please fill out this form. Participants from all career stages are welcomed to serve as mentors and/or mentees to share your valuable insights to early staged scientists and even peers!

Registration Deadline: 11:59 PM Eastern Time (UTC−05:00), May 2nd, 2025.

Sign up now as a mentor or mentee!

Congratulations to the 2025 Dobzhansky Prize recipient, Dr. Emily Roycroft! Dr. Roycroft is a Group Leader and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at Monash University. Her research uses cutting-edge genomic approaches to understand evolutionary and ecological questions across the micro- to macroevolutionary continuum. Her work uses museum genomics to reconstruct the evolutionary and demographic history of past and present biodiversity, especially Australia’s globally unique and threatened mammals. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2021 and was a postdoc at Australian National University until 2024. Dr. Roycroft will present the Dobzhansky Prize talk at the in-person portion of the Evolution meeting in Athens, GA in June. 

The SSE Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC) is excited to announce the 2025 Evolution Art/Photography Competition and Exhibition. Students and postdocs from around the world are invited to submit evolutionary biology-themed artwork or photography for a chance to win an award and be highlighted as the best evolution art/photography of 2025. If selected as finalists, you will be invited to present your art/photography at a live virtual event hosted on Gather.Town in February.

Learn more and post your art or photo by May 15th.

Congratulations to this year’s T. H. Huxley Award recipient, Dr. Elizabeth Schultheis! Dr. Schultheis is the Education and Outreach Coordinator for the Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research Program at Michigan State University. She was selected for her collection of educational resources called "Data Nuggets". Data Nuggets, which were developed in collaboration with Dr. Melissa Kjelvik, bring real data and scientific role models into the classroom to build quantitative and critical thinking skills. To learn more about her work, visit the Data Nuggets website.

As part of the award, Dr. Schultheis will receive funding to present her work at the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) conference in October.

The T. H. Huxley Award is administered by the T. H. Huxley Award Committee, a subset of the SSE Education and Outreach Committee.

Dr. Melissa Kjelvik (left) and Dr. Elizabeth Schultheis (right), creators of Data Nuggets.