Mohamed Noor Updates


December 11, 2014

Dear SSE Colleagues:

Congratulations and thanks to our newly elected Council members!
President-elect Kim Hughes (Florida State, will serve as president in 2016)
Secretary Cynthia Weinig (University of Wyoming)
Councilor Andrea Case (Kent State University)
Councilor Kristi Montooth (University of Nebraska)

Additionally, special thanks to Maria Servedio (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), who will serve as a new Handling Editor for Evolution. Extra special thanks to Council members who are rotating off this year: Rich Lenski (president in 2013, who gave an outstanding speech that year in Snowbird), John Kelly (extremely dutiful secretary who also kept the 2014 president in check whenever possible), and Councilors Aneil Agrawal and Judith Mank. Thanks also to Thomas Lenormand for his service as a Handling Editor for Evolution.

To let you know what's been accomplished this year, here are some SSE Highlights from 2014 beyond the usual (publishing great science in Evolution, recognizing outstanding young scientists with the Dobzhansky & Fisher prizes, etc.):

  • $54,000 given for 22 Rosemary Grant research awards to PhD students
  • $20,000 to support 16 researchers from low-GDP countries to attend the Evolution 2014 conference in Raleigh
  • Special committee formed and generated recommendations for future actions by the SSE regarding preparing students for diverse career options in evolutionary biology (more info forthcoming)
  • Allocated $100,000 for student travel awards for Evolution 2015 in Brazil (applications invited soon-- watch your e-mail for this and other graduate-student-related news)
  • Cosponsored Evolution 2014 About Women in Science events and committed efforts to team addressing diversity in society activities (assessing past and strategizing future)
  • Sponsored mixer at Evolution 2014 for "EvoLat", supporting research in and connections associated with Latin American countries
  • Finalizing contract for new journal EVOLUTION LETTERS, jointly sponsored by ESEB, with anticipated launch in 2015
  • Participation in numerous education & outreach activities, including successful education symposium at Evolution 2014 and awarding small grants
  • Participation in CourseSource as well as setting up new online educational resource EvoEd
  • Video recorded 77 talks from Evolution 2014 conference, and made available online HERE

SSE Awards Accepting Nominations/Submissions
There are a number of deadlines upcoming for SSE Awards.
Stephen Jay Gould Prize - December 18
Fisher Prize - January 31
Dobzhansky Prize - February 15
Rosemary Grant Research Award - April 1

The 2015 SSE Annual Meeting
Save the dates of <span data-term="goog_320977621" tabindex="0">June 26-30, 2015 for the next SSE annual meeting which will take place at the Casa Grande Resort in Guarujá, Brazil.  We anticipate that registration will open in January.  Some information is already being posted at the EVOLUTION 2015 meeting site. 

Watch for announcements regarding student travel awards in January!

Thank you for your continued work and support of our mission.

Best wishes,
Mohamed Noor, President
Society for the Study of Evolution
SSE Business Office
PO Box 299  |  St. Louis Missouri, 63166
314-577-9566
www.evolutionsociety.org
 


 SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF EVOLUTION


November 5, 2014

Dear SSE Colleagues:

First of all, I want to thank you for your past support of the Society for the Study of Evolution. This is a reminder to renew your membership now.  Membership remains very inexpensive, and your dues help support the many wonderful benefits that the Society brings to all of us: the highly-ranked journal Evolution, a scientifically diverse and stimulating annual conference, and some important and valuable opportunities for awards and student travel grants. 

PLEASE RENEW ONLINE NOW

A few key points about SSE membership:
* Membership dues remain at very reasonable rates, just $25 for Students and $50 for Professional members.
* Online access to Evolution is included with your membership dues.
* Evolution in print continues to be a bargain at just $75 for delivery of 12 issues.
* SSE members receive discounted registration rates to the annual Evolution meeting.
* SSE members also receive many other benefits described here

The Society puts the majority of dues and meeting revenues back into our missionthrough research and travel awards as well as educational and outreach activities.  SSE spent over $100,000 just on student awards in 2013, and that amount has increased -- we have budgeted $100,000 just for student travel awards to the 2015 annual meeting, in addition to our other student-centered awards (e.g., Rosemary Grant awards and prizes listed below).

SSE Election

The election is currently underway.  Winning candidates will serve beginning on January 1, 2015. Voting will close on Friday, November 14.  If you have not cast your ballot, please VOTE NOW.

SSE Awards Accepting Nominations/Submissions
Start thinking about nominations for 2015 Society awards.  The Society for the Study of Evolution’s Committee for the Stephen Jay Gould Prize for the Improvement for the Understanding of Evolution is soliciting nominations for the Award for 2015.  The award includes a prize of $5,000, and the recipient will present the Public Outreach Seminar at the Evolution Meeting in Brazil (expenses for travel/lodging and registration to be covered by the SSE). The nomination deadline for this award is December 18, 2014.  A number of other awards have deadlines in January and February, so now is the time to begin thinking about nominations and working on submissions.
Fisher Prize - January 31
Dobzhansky Prize - February 15
Rosemary Grant Research Award - April 1

The 2015 SSE Annual Meeting
Save the dates of June 26-30, 2015 for the next SSE annual meeting which will take place at theCasa Grande Resort in Guarujá, Brazil.  We anticipate that registration will open in January.  Some information is already being posted at theEVOLUTION 2015 meeting site.

Thank you for your continued work and support of our mission!

Best wishes,
Mohamed Noor, President
Society for the Study of Evolution

SSE Business Office
PO Box 299  |  St. Louis Missouri, 63166
314-577-9566
www.evolutionsociety.org

 

August 27, 2014

Dear SSE Colleague:

I want to extend a big thank you to Allen Rodrigo & team for a phenomenal Evolution 2014 meeting. Videos of 78 of the  talks are online so if you could not attend, you can still get a taste of what the meeting was like. Mark your calendars now and plan to join us for EVOLUTION 2015June 26-30, 2015 at the Casa Grande Hotel, Guarujá, São Paulo, Brazil.  Remember that US citizens NEED TO GET A VISA ~1-2 months in advance to travel to Brazil.  Save the date for EVOLUTION 2016: June 17-21 in Austin, Texas.

IMPORTANT SOCIETY ITEMS

  • $100K has been allocated for SSE student member travel awards for Evolution 2015 (more information on this very soon - deadline will likely be in January 2015!)
  • A new committee has been formed and charged with making recommendations of effective strategies to facilitate exposing students to diverse career options.
  • Funds available for SSE student member travel to ESEB and other conferences - see THIS LINK for details on eligibility
  • New journal being planned jointly with ESEB: Evolution Letters

SSE STUDENT ADVISORY COUNCIL:
We welcome PhD student Karl Grieshop who joins us as an additional member of SSE Student Advisory Council (serving with Cathy Rushworth from Duke University, in her second year in this role). Karl works in Göran Arnqvist's lab at Uppsala University studying the architecture of sexually antagonistic genetic variation.  We will be seeking two more members to serve in 2015. 

NEW RESOURCE: EvoED DIGITAL LIBRARY
The EvoED Digital Library is a peer-reviewed online educational resource maintained by SSE. EvoED is part of a suite of resources established under the Digital Resource Discovery Project, with support from NSF and AAAS, and in partnership with the Ecological Society of America, the Botanical Society of America, and the Society for Economic Botany. While there are currently more than 1000 resources in the shared Digital Resource Library, most of the content to date has been acquired via the EcoED portal. SSE would like to see EvoED reach its potential as a resource for evolution educators, especially with regard to undergraduate instruction. To achieve this goal, the editors of EvoED, Tom Meagher and Rich Kliman, invite self-nominations for a newly established board of reviewers. At the same time, the editors invite educators to contribute evolution-focused content -- particularly exercises, computer simulations, and other tools that have been used successfully in the laboratory and classroom to help students better understand evolutionary principles. Prospective reviewers should contact Rich Kliman (rmkliman@cedarcrest.edu). Instructions for submitting original content to EvoED can be found at http://evoed.evolutionsociety.org.

All the best,

Mohamed Noor, President

Society for the Study of Evolution

SSE Business Office
4475 Castleman Avenue  |  St. Louis Missouri, 63110-3201
314-577-9566
www.evolutionsociety.org


 

June 2, 2014

Dear SSE Colleagues:

Happy summer 2014! We’re all really excited about the upcoming Evolution 2014 conference in Raleigh, NC, USA, starting June 20!  Below please find some important Society and meeting news.

Award Winners Announced
Daniel Matute of the University of Chicago (starting a faculty position at UNC-Chapel Hill in fall, 2014) was awarded the Society for the Study of Evolution’s 2014 Dobzhansky Prize. This award recognizes the accomplishments and future promise of an outstanding young evolutionary biologists. Daniel has already made seminal contributions to our understanding of the genetics and evolution underlying species formation. He’ll present an address at the 2014 conference entitled "Drosophila, reproductive isolation, and speciation," as well as a separate symposium talk entitled "The genetic architecture of hybrid inviability in Drosophila."

The winner of the 2014 Stephen Jay Gould Prize is Steve Jones of University College London. Professor J. Stephen Jones is well known in Britain and worldwide as an eloquent spokesperson for promoting the public understanding of science, particularly with regard to evolution. Steve Jones will deliver the Gould Prize Lecture at 5:30 PM on Friday, June 20th, 2014 in the Raleigh Convention Center Ballroom C. The title of his talk is “Snails in Art and the Art of Snails: An Evolutionist’s Journey Through Science and the Arts.”

The R. A. Fisher Prize is awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution for an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation paper published in the journal Evolution during a given calendar year. This year’s Fisher Prize is awarded to Dr. Amy Hurford for her paper: Hurford, A. and T. Day. 2013.Immune evasion and the evolution of molecular mimicry in parasitesEvolution 67(10): 2889-2904.

Congratulations to the 22 graduate student winners of the Rosemary Grant Awards!  These awards assist students in the early stages of their Ph.D. programs by enabling them to collect preliminary data or to enhance the scope of their research beyond current funding limits.

EVOLUTION 2014- New Services
In the spirit of sharing and dissemination of scientific information, Evolution 2014 offers two new, voluntary services. First, presenters of talks or posters are welcome to upload their slides or poster to F1000 Posters, thereby allowing people to see to their content again after the conference dates. For more information, please visit this site. We advise submitters to consider whether F1000 Poster contributions could affect subsequent publication in a particular refereed journal. Second, more than 100 people offered to allow their conference talks to be videotaped and put online. This is an experimental service, so we appreciate everyone's patience as we try it for the first time. If you're a student who would like to volunteer to record some of the talks with your personal device (e.g., smartphone) in exchange for US$10 per recording, please provide your information HERE.

Call for Symposia for 2015 Annual Meeting
The 2015 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution is planned for June 26-30, 2015 in Guaruja, Brazil. The SSE Council invites proposals for the two Society-sponsored symposia to be held in conjunction with the meeting. To learn more or to submit a proposal, please visit our site.  The deadline is this Friday, June 6.

Looking forward to seeing many of you in Raleigh later this month.

Best wishes,
Mohamed Noor, President
Society for the Study of Evolution

SSE Business Office | PO Box 299  |  St. Louis Missouri, 63166 | 314-577-9566
www.evolutionsociety.org


 

Dear SSE Colleagues:



EVOLUTION 2014 Meeting News
Here are some upcoming deadlines for EVO 2014.
Join us in Raleigh, North Carolina on June 20-24.

  * April 14: undergraduate travel awards close
  * April 16: early-bird registration and presentation submission deadline
  * May 23: childcare registration deadline
  * May 31: deadline to enter the evolution film festival
  * late-May/early-June: complete program becomes available; stay tuned
  * June 1: cancellation deadline

Best wishes,
Mohamed Noor, President
Society for the Study of Evolution


 

Dear SSE Colleagues:



EVOLUTION 2014 Meeting News
Save the date!  This year SSE will meet in Raleigh, North Carolina on June 20-24.  This is the premier opportunity to share scientific research on evolution. There will be symposia, contributed papers, and poster sessions, and we’re expecting around 1,500 participants. NESCent, the National Evolutionary Science Center, is organizing the <a href="http://evolution2014.org/" moz-do-not-send="true">Evolution 2014 meeting.  So visit the web site for all the latest information.  Stay tuned for an email when registration opens and make your plans now to join us in Raleigh next June!

T.H. Huxley Award
The SSE Education & Outreach Committee is pleased to announce the T. H. Huxley award, named in honor of Darwin's very public supporter, which provides funding for an SSE member to present at the National Association of Biology Teachers annual conference.  If you have an interesting project or educational activity to share with high school, community college or undergraduate faculty, consider applying for this award. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are encouraged to apply.  This year’s conference will be held Nov 12-15 in Cleveland, OH.  The deadline for applying for the Huxley award is March 7.  Apply here: http://tinyurl.com/kzy8uvw

Rosemary Grant Research Awards
Now is the time to begin thinking about applications for the Rosemary Grant Research Award.  Awards will range from $1,500 - $2500 and approximately twenty awards will be made.  The Grant awards are to assist students in the early stages of their Ph.D (first two years) programs by enabling them to collect preliminary data or to enhance the scope of their research beyond current funding limits (e.g. by visiting additional field sites, or working at other labs). Deadline for the Rosemary Grant Research Award - April 1

EVOLUTION Journal News
Just a reminder that we have made it easy for you to find articles from back issues of Evolution from the SSE website.  After you’ve logged on as a member, you can get any issue from 2000 onward via the link to the Wiley page, and you can get older volumes by following the JSTOR link.  Have you checked out the research in the February issue yet?

Graduate Student Advisory Council
We will soon be looking to add a new member to the still-forming Graduate Student Advisory Council.  A separate email will go out to the graduate student membership shortly.  Be on the lookout and please consider volunteering your time to help shape your Society.

Give An SSE Gift Membership
To assist in the continued growth of the Society, we encourage you to recruit new student members from your labs and classrooms.  Did you know that you can give a student a NEW membership for only $10?  Look at the students around you and give a gift membership or two this year!  We want to grow our student population, so please consider this special invitation.  We also invite you to take advantage of the opportunity of giving gift associate memberships to colleagues from developing countries, also at the low rate of $10.  This is an easy and amazing way to introduce new members to our community.  CLICK HERE to give a gift membership.


Best wishes,
Mohamed Noor, President
Society for the Study of Evolution


 

14 January, 2014

Dear SSE Colleagues:

Happy New Year to all, and a special welcome to our new members!  I have just recently taken over the position as SSE President and am looking forward to working with the SSE Council at our upcoming January meeting.  We are anticipating a busy and exciting year ahead.  Congratulations to all the new 2014 officers!  To see a listing of SSE officers and Council members for 2014,  CLICK HERE.

Your SSE membership has not yet been renewed for 2014.  Please take a moment to do so, before you drop off of our mailing list.  RENEW HERE!

EVOLUTION Journal News
Just a reminder that we have made it easy for you to find articles from back issues of Evolution from the  SSE website.  After you’ve logged on as a member, you can get any issue from 2000 onward via the link to the Wiley page, and you can get older volumes by following the JSTOR link.

SSE Awards Accepting Nominations/Submissions
As in previous years, there will be various awards and prizes, including the W. D. Hamilton Award for Outstanding Student Presentation at the 2014 meeting, the Rosemary Grant Student Research Awards for students in the first two years of their Ph.D. programs, and the R. A. Fisher Prize for an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation paper published in Evolution during 2013.  You can find out more about these and other awards, including application details and deadlines, under the AWARDS tab at the  SSE website.  A number of awards have deadlines in January and February, so now is the time to begin thinking about nominations and working on submissions.
Fisher Prize - January 31
Dobzhansky Prize - February 15
Rosemary Grant Research Award - April 1

SSE International Committee Award Opportunities
The SSE-IC mission is to foster international relationships between evolution societies and its members with particular focus on students and early-career scientists. The committee sponsors annually a series of activities/awards to reach this goal.  Check out each of the following three to see if these opportunities might be right for you.
1. International Travel Stipends (IT- Awards)
2. Co-sponsorship of symposia organized by non-US based evolution societies
3. Evolution International Events (EIE) awards
The International Travel Stipend is managed directly by the SSE-IC committee. For the other two award types, the SSE-IC committee will present the best proposals to the SSE council, which will decide on the winner for that year. The equivalent of 10,000 euros will be devoted to the International Travel stipends. The rest of the available funding will be either given to either a single proposal from one category or divided amongst the best proposals in either of the two categories.

Call for Proposals for SSE Outreach Awards
January 25th is the deadline to apply for funds for a project/activity that supports and promotes the understanding of evolutionary biology.  Read more about these awards HERE.

Give An SSE Gift Membership
To assist in the continued growth of the Society, we encourage you to recruit new student members from your labs and classrooms.  Did you know that you can give a student a NEW membership for only $10?  Look at the students around you and give a gift membership or two this year!  We want to grow our student population, so please consider this special invitation.  We also invite you to take advantage of the opportunity of giving gift associate memberships to colleagues from developing countries, also at the low rate of $10.  This is an easy and amazing way to introduce new members to our community.  CLICK HERE to give a gift membership.


EVOLUTION 2014 Meeting News
Save the date!  This year SSE will meet in Raleigh, North Carolina on June 20-24.  This is the premier opportunity to share scientific research on evolution. There will be symposia, contributed papers, and poster sessions, and we’re expecting around 1,500 participants. We plan to open the registration and abstract submission sites by the end of this month.    NESCent, the National Evolutionary Science Center, is organizing the Evolution 2014 meeting.

Make your plans now to join us in Raleigh next June!

Best wishes,
Mohamed Noor, President
Society for the Study of Evolution
SSE Business Office
PO Box 299  |  St. Louis Missouri, 63166
314-577-9566
www.evolutionsociety.org


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