Text and photos by Dylan Sosa
This summer, seven members of the department travelled to Beijing, China to attend the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) Annual Meeting. The SMBE meeting is one of the premier conferences in the field of molecular evolution and brings together researchers from across the world to share ideas and perspectives. Our department had strong representation: three student oral presentations, two student poster presentations, and two faculty invited presentations! Topics from the department spanned: population genetics, cell type evolution, RNA biology, phenotypic evolution, genetic regulation, and new genes. We also had two prize winners from the department: Sofia Sheikh won the Young Investigator Attendance Award and Dylan Sosa was one of eight grad students selected for the Graduate Student Excellence Award. Congratulations to the Kronforst, Long, Steinrücken, and Thornton labs!