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Schedule of Presentations
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8-8:45am: Registration + Breakfast
8:45-9:15am: Keynote Speaker
Matthew Leslie, PhD (Swarthmore College); Talk title TBD
9:15-10:25am: Evolution and the Environment
9:15, Jarome Ali - "Ring around the rosellas: Plumage evolution in a putative ring species"
9:20, Ozan Kiratli - "Effects of migration on rapid adaptation and the genetic basis of dispersal behavior in natural
populations of D. melanogaster"
9:25, Avery Selberg - "Consequences of hybridization between two native milkweed species (Asclepias) in their natural
hybrid zone"
9:30, Rachel Keown - "E. arborea: Combined Sequencing strategies reveal high genetic differentiation between
populations"
9:35, Chelsea Smith - "Evolution of pyrrolizidine alkaloid biosynthesis in Apocynaceae: inference of ancestral function
in the pathway-specific enzyme, homospermidine synthase"
9:50, Wendy Clement - "Genomic and morphological insights to the evolution of leaf fusion in honeysuckles (Lonicera,
Caprifoliaceae)"
9:55, Lauren Frazee - "Urban phenotypic evolution in the American plantain (Plantago rugelii), a native weed"
10:00, Andrea Fetters - "The pollen virome: viral discovery and diversity"
10:15, Ourania Nikolaidas - "Urban Buzz: How urbanization influences bee phenology and communities"
10:20, Meghan Barrett - "Neuroanatomical differentiation associated with alternative mate location strategies in the
brains of dimorphic Centris pallida bees"
10:25-10:50am: Coffee Break
10:50am-noon: Symbiosis + Sociality
10:50, Dovid Koslovsky - "Spatiotemporal Variation in Network Structure Among Resident and Irruption-visitor
Chickadees"
11:05, Virginia Caponera - "Variations in brain region allocation across a gradient of spider sociality"
11:10, Taylor Kessinger - "Social evolution on networks"
11:15, Justin Walsh - "The genetic basis of collective behavior"
11:20, Tali Reiner Brodetzki - "The Interplay between Incipient Species and Social Polymorphism
in the Desert Ant Cataglyphis"
11:35, Katherine Fiocca - "Effects of nutritional physiology on reproductive caste in a eusocial tropical paper wasp
(Mischocyttarus pallidipectus)"
11:40, Benoit Bechade - "Bacterial symbionts in larval and adult turtle ant guts can degrade recalcitrant polymers from
their host's diet"
11:45, Na Wei - "Pollinators mediate floral microbial assembly in response to agrochemical disturbance"
11:50, Linyao Peng - "Strain variation shapes endosymbiont community structure and, possibly, transmission rates in
the pea aphid"
11:55, Melissa Carpenter - "Diversity of an Endosymbiont and its Phage: Hamiltonella defensa and APSE"
Noon-1:45pm: Lunch and Posters
1:45-2:15pm: Keynote Speaker
Daven Presgraves, PhD (University of Rochester); Talk title TBD
2:15-3:00pm: Population Genetics and Evolutionary Dynamics
2:15, Andrew Webb - "The Popgen Pipeline Platform: A Software Platform for Facilitating Population Genomic
Analyses"
2:30, Tristan Stark - "Characterizing amino acid substitution with complete linkage of sites on a lineage"
2:35, Chai Molina - "Towards evolutionary game theory in realistic populations"
2:40, Westin Kosater - "A Statistical Analysis of Clusters of Amino Acid Substitutions to Compare Compensatory
Processes with Directional Selection"
2:45, Qiqing Tao - "A new method for inferring timetrees from temporally sampled molecular sequences"
3:00-3:30pm: Novogene Coffee Break
3:30-4:25pm: Functional Genomics and Molecular Evolution
3:30, Saurin Parikh - "LI Detector: An accurate and sensitive tool to analyze colony-based high-throughput screens"
3:35, Ryan Vignogna - "Experimental evolution of a yeast model of congenital disorders of glycosylation"
3:40, Dimitra Aggeli - "Fitness effects of variants that emerged during S. cerevisiae adaptation"
3:55, Lu Yang - "Evolution of toxin resistance in frogs: neo-functionalization of duplicated genes in the presence of
gene conversion"
4:00, Dan Ju - "The evolution of skin pigmentation associated variation in Europe"
4:05, Severin Uebbing - "Discovering human-specific substitutions that alter neurodevelopmental enhancer activity"
4:20, Jose Barba-Montoya - "The discrepancy of molecular and morphological clocks is largely imperceptible in
divergence time estimation"
4:30-5:00pm: Keynote Speaker
Sarah Tishkoff, PhD (University of Pennsylvania); Talk title TBD
Poster Presentations
1. Jonathan Falciani - Pruning rogue taxa before dating analysis.
2. Labeeqa Khizir - Solving the plastid puzzle: de novo assembly of Viburnum using next generation
sequencing.
3. Jennifer Le - Lack of fat and lower biodiversity yields increased aggression in urban ants.
4. Sarah Dolce - A strange new world: hybridization in the Anthropocene.
5. Aaron Lee - Exploring the evolutionary history of the cup-shaped cotyledon (CUC) gene family in the
honeysuckles (Lonicera, Caprifoliaceae) and relatives.
6. Mathew Pekora - Behavioral consistency of honey bee nurses.
7. Shakibur Rahman - A novel method to estimate dN/dS in the presence selection on transcriptional
efficiency.
8. Matthew Fertakos - The power of herbarium specimens: Using digitized collections to study species
distribution modeling and phenology.
9. Amy Antonio - Diversity of Caulobacter crescentus bacteriophages: Morphological and biological properties
of phages isolated from lakes in Cumberland County, New Jersey.
10. Gia Picknally - The role of miR156 in altered flowering time of elevated carbon dioxide grown plants.
11. Jasmine Hendy - Brain wiring and supragranular-enriched genes linked to protracted human frontal cortex
development.
12. Amanda Wilson - Whole genome duplication events drive diversification of the myostatin pathway in
Salmonidae.
13. Veronica Iriat - Herbicide dicamba has species-specific effects on wildflowers and alters the timing and
abundance of pollinator resources.
14. Daniel Marad - Targeted identification of overdominant diploid mutations in budding yeast.
15. Alyssa Pivirotto - Natural selection and demographic history influence the distributions of ages of rare
variants.
16. Lu Yang - Adaptive substitutions underlying cardiac glycoside insensitivity in insects exhibit epistasis in
vivo.
17. Andrew Conboy - Exploration of structural variation in evolved S. cerevisiae using long and short read
sequencing.
18. Caryn Babaian - How to build a super predator.
19. Omer Acar - Exploring de novo gene emergence through genetic interaction networks.
20. Alexander Lucaci - Estimating the consequences of multiple simultaneous mutations on inferences of
evolutionary selection.
21. Michael Chambers - Exploring the combinatorial fitness landscape of co-evolving human and viral proteins.
22. Kwangwon Lee - Habitat specific clock variation and its consequence on reproductive fitness.
23. Rebecca Hayes - Petal bacterial UV tolerance varies between host flowers that display different UV
patterns.
24. Sayaka Miura - Predicting clone phylogenies from tumor sequencing data.
25. Antonia Chroni - Can we infer tumor migration routes by using biogeographic methods?
26. Marco Caraballo - Considerations and challenges building a shallow-level phylogeny in plants using
transcriptome-based sequences.
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