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Schedule of Presentations
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8-9am: Registration
9-9:45am: American Society of Naturalists Plenary Speaker
Jason Weckstein, PhD; "The evolution of birds and their parasites: what can they tell us
about correlates of diversification?"
9:45-10:30am: Session One
9:45, Cindy Skema - Diversification of the flora of Madagascar
10:00, Jarome Ali - Plumage evolution in amazon parrots
10:15, Erica Lawrence - The functional significance of vegetative phase changes in plants
10:20, Audrey Miller - Eye of the beholder: manipulating colorful signals in animal behavior research
10:25, Monica Carlson - Ecology and evolution of plumage patterns in Melanerpes woodpeckers
10:30-11:00am: Coffee Break
11:00am-noon: Session Two
11:00, Linyao Peng - Mechanisms behind symbiont community structure in the pea aphid
11:15, Benoit Bechade - A tale of two stages: the divergent microbiomes of larval vs. adult turtle ants encode overlapping, yet partially unique, digestive functions
11:30, Janelle Couret - Evidence of adaptive parasite manipulation by Lyme disease agent, Borrelia burgdorferi, in black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis)
11:35, Michael Warner - The convergent basis of social evolution in ants and bees
11:40, Justin Walsh - Phenotypic correlation between queen and worker brood care supports the role of maternal care in the evolution of eusociality
11:45, Katherine Fiocca - Eating your way to becoming queen: adult nutrition influences social caste in tropical paper wasps (Mischocyttarus spp.)
11:50, Mark Nessel - Global body size scaling of elemental content in invertebrates and vertebrates
11:55, Nandita Garud - Evolution of commensal gut bacteria in the human microbiome
Noon-1:30pm: Lunch and Posters
1:30-3:20pm: Session Three
1:30, Katy Gonder - High resolution SNP genotyping in wild chimpanzees and the case for ecological speciation in Cameroon
1:45, Allison Kolpas - Optimal mating strategies for preferentially outcrossing simultaneous hermaphrodites in the presence of predators
2:00, Jaime Iranzo - How genetic parasites persist despite the purge of natural selection
2:15, Ravi Patel - Thousands of adaptive polymorphisms in the evolutionary history of the human coding genome
2:30, Kaitlin Fisher - Dominance at a single locus constrains chromosomal evolution
2:35, Stephanie Lauer - Single-cell copy number variant detection reveals the dynamics and diversity of adaptation
2:40, Grace Avecilla - The molecular basis of fitness differences in copy number variants
2:45, Pieter Spealman - Diverse mechanisms of copy number variant formation observed in experimentally evolved populations
2:50, Fabrizio Spagnolo - Fitness landscapes after antibiotic resistance
2:55, Sean Buskirk - Host-virus genome coevolution in laboratory populations of yeast
3:00, Andrew Ritchie - Investigating lineage- and site-heterogeneous mutation-selection models for detecting directional evolution
3:05, Dimitra Aggeli - Probing the effect of the evolutionary past on adaptation
3:10, Jae Young Choi - Natural variation in telomere repeats, a major plant satellite DNA, correlates with flowering time variation
3:15, Eugene Plavskin - Distinct distributions of mutational effects on fitness revealed by high-throughput phenotyping
3:20-4:00pm: Coffee Break
4:00-4:45pm: Genetics Society of America Plenary Speaker
Paul Turner, PhD: "Using phage to select for evolution of reduced virulence in
pathogenic bacteria"
4:45-5:00pm: Student Awards and Closing
Poster Presentations
1. Ourania Nikolaidis - Do priority effects change the structure of interaction networks between ants and
honeydew-producing insects after acute storm stress?
2. Shin-Yi Lin - A conserved TRA-1 activator is subject to divergent regulatory controls in Caenorhabditis
nematodes
3. Svjetlana Vojvodic - Altered gut microbiome influencing honey bee learning
4. Caryn Babaian - Biology Mandalas, Evolution, and Ecology
5. John Favate - Characterization of transcriptional and translational changes over 50,000 generations of
bacterial adaptation
6. Satheeja Santhi Velayudhan - Control of Caenorhabditis briggsae germline development by TRA-1
interacting co-factors
7. Chelsea Smith - Does herbivore co-option of a plant defense drive its loss? Testing the defense de-
escalation of pyrrolizidine alkaloid evolution in Apocynaceae (the dogbane and milkweed family)
8. Tyrell Harris - Eat, Sleep, Work: Repeating Task Cycles in Honey Bee Nurses
9. Emily Fanwick - Effect of Caste on Army Any Gut Microbiome
10. Clair Han and Patrick Reilly - Evaluation of errors in variant calling in non-model species
11. Joshua Waters - Fungal Adaptation of Carbon-Utilization Through Transcriptional Rewiring
12. Elizabeth Heppenheimer - High genomic diversity and candidate genes under selection associated with
range expansion in eastern coyote (Canis latrans) populations
13. Ryan Vignogna - Identifying positive genetic interactions using experimental evolution
14. Ian Nichols - Impacts of Agroforestry on Mammals
15. Rohini Singh - Increase in colony fitness of pharaoh ants by a bacterial endosymbiont
16. Lane D'Alessandro - Optimizing Fitness using Resource Allocation
17. Jeremiah Budgeon - Predation Risk Impact on Snail Reproduction
18. Farah Abdul-Rahman - Quantifying fitness of budding yeast in periodically fluctuating environments
19. Sebastian Harris - Rapid Assessment of Amphibian Species Richness Along an Urban-Wildland Gradient
20. Samantha Schofield - The Effects of Habitat Complexity on Arthropod Species Diversity in High-Stress
Environments
21. Bala S. C. Koritala - Uncoupled Circadian Clock Enhances Reproductive Fitness in North American N.
discreta
22.Yuying Rong - Understanding the processes driving duplicate gene retention
23. Nikole Andre and Carleigh Engstrom - Using microsatellite genotyping to characterize migration patterns
in Striped Bass
24. Meghan Barrett - Worker-caste differences in brain investment reflect soldier behavioral specialization in
Eciton Army Ants
25. Qiqing Tao - Pervasive correlation of molecular evolutionary rates in the tree of life
26. Tiffany Longo, Summer Shaheed, and Sebastian Vera - Variation in reproductive traits among house mice
adapted to different climates in the Americas
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