Douglas Joel Futuyma
Stony Brook University, Department of Ecology and Evolution, New York, USA
Douglas Futuyma's research interests in evolution focus primarily on speciation and the evolution of ecological interactions among species. He has been a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the American Insitute of Biological Sciences, the editor of Evolution, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is editor of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, and is the author of the successful textbooks Evolutionary Biology and Evolution.
Olivia Roth
Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research GEOMAR, Kiel, Germany
Why males and females exist and how sex roles have evolved belong to the most controversial issues in evolutionary biology. Parental Investment and Immune Dynamics research group examine the evolution of male pregnancy in pipefishes and seahorses (syngnathids) by addressing its genetic basis and the modulations of the immune system. Insights into joint and distinct loss or recruitment of genes along with the establishment of novel genes for male vs. female pregnancy, will help to unravel convergent evolution of parental investment and pregnancy.
Dieter Ebert
Universität Basel, Departement of Environmental Sciences, Basel, Switzerland
The main focus of the research group of Dieter Ebert are the evolution, genomics and ecology of host-parasite and host-mutualist interactions. Research topics include local adaptation, coevolution, evolution in metapopulations, the evolution of microbiota, the evolution of sex, genome evolution, trait mapping and genetic/genomic architecture. In the last years we developed a Diversity Panel of the crustacean Daphnia magna with the aim to understand species wide patterns of genomic and phenotypic diversity.
Laurent Duret
Université Claude Bernard, Laboratoire de Biométrie et Biologie Évolutive, Lyon, France
My principle research interest is to understand the processes that drive genome evolution. I try to analyze the relative contribution of selection, mutation, drift and biased gene conversion (BGC) to the evolution of genomic features. During my PhD and my postdoc I studied the evolution of non-coding sequences in vertebrate genomes. I discovered that many vertebrate genes contain long highly conserved sequences in their non-coding regions. I also started studying the isochore organization of vertebrate genomes. During the last 10 years, we found strong evidence that the evolution of these peculiar genomic landscapes is the consequence of recombination, via the BGC process.
Lucie Zinger
Institut de Biologie de l'École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Since then, my main research question has been how complex assemblages of elusive organisms, such as microbes or even invertebrates, do respond to – or interact with – their biotic and abiotic environment. More recently, I became also interested in their link with ecosystems functioning. To address these questions, I use both in situ and experimental approaches to study a diversity of systems, ranging from host-associated microbial communities to the whole soil biota.