LATEST NEWS

SSE is pleased to announce that we are once again joining with the American Institute of Biological Sciences to sponsor the 16th annual Biological Sciences Congressional District Visits event.

This national initiative is an opportunity for scientists across the country to meet with their federal or state elected officials to showcase the people, facilities, and equipment that are required to support and conduct scientific research.

The Biological Sciences Congressional District Visits event enables scientists, graduate students, representatives of research facilities, and people affiliated with scientific collections to meet with their federal or state elected officials without traveling to Washington, DC.  Participating scientists can either meet with their elected officials at the local district office or invite them to visit their research facility. Meetings will take place mid-July through October, depending on the participant’s schedule and their lawmaker’s availability.

SSE members who participate will receive one-on-one support and online training to prepare for their tour or meeting.

We encourage our members to participate in this important event. Participation is free for SSE members, but registration is required. 

Registration will close on July 14, 2025.  To register, visit io.aibs.org/cdv.

The SSE Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC) is looking for three new council members to join our 2026 cohort. The GSAC represents student and postdoc interests to the SSE Council and facilitates interaction among students and postdocs, and between students, postdocs, and mentors. Our goal is to be a source of information for students and postdocs during their graduate school career and as they make career transitions, and to provide an early-career perspective to the rest of the SSE council. Students serve either a 2 or 3 year term, depending on whether they are chair of their cohort, and generally spend 5-10 hours per month on GSAC activities. 

We strongly encourage those with non-traditional pathways to graduate school, those from non-R1 universities, and those from outside the United States to apply. GSAC is also committed to diverse representation, and we encourage applicants from historically underrepresented backgrounds. 

Learn more and apply by July 24.

Congratulations to this year’s recipient of the W. D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation, Kip Lacy! Lacy’s winning talk was titled “Unselfish meiotic drive maintains heterozygosity in the clonal raider ant,” presented during the virtual Hamilton Award symposium as part of the annual Evolution meeting. Lacy will present his talk again at the in-person Evolution meeting in Athens, GA on Sunday, June 22 at 11:45 AM in Olympia 1.

The Hamilton Award Committee is pleased to recognize two Honorable Mentions for this award: Meagan Clark, who presented “Long-term demographic and genomic data reveal the consequences of land-use change and inbreeding in populations of a threatened rattlesnake,” and Jeremy Summers, who presented “Isolation in real-time: the demographic and fitness consequences of declining immigration.” 

All three talks are also available to watch on YouTube.

Join the field gear and clothing swap at Evolution 2025!

One barrier to entry for new evolutionary biologists can be the cost of field clothing and gear. To help reduce these barriers, the society Diversity Committees are hosting a field clothing and gear swap!

If you have field gear or clothes in good condition that you no longer use, and you think someone else could make use of them, please bring them to the in-person portion of the 2025 Evolution meeting in Athens, GA. These items could be clothing, tents, camp stoves, headlamps, camp chairs, binoculars, compasses, shovels, butterfly nets, or anything that could help a fellow field researcher.

There will be bins set up at the Tri-Society DEI booth, and people are welcome to come by anytime to grab something that may be of interest. Used clothing and gear in decent shape will happily be accepted, but if you’re feeling extra generous, we also welcome donations of new items. Any gear that has been in contact with plants and/or soil should be fully sterilized.

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

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.