Seminar Series Spring 2026 Schedule

I’m excited to announce the Spring 2026 schedule for our Genome Structure, Evolution Seminar Series at the University at Buffalo!

This interdisciplinary series features invited speakers whose work spans evolutionary genomics, structural variation, and/or anthropology. Talks are designed to be interactive, discussion-driven, and accessible to a broad academic audience, including students and researchers from diverse backgrounds.

Seminar Schedule:

• January 16 – Zexuan Chen, Durham University, Diet as a driver of natural selection in human evolution: a paleo-empirical perspective

• January 23 – Rozenn Pineau, University of Chicago, The genomic response to drought across spatiotemporal scales in Amaranthus tuberculatus

• February 6 – Aaron Pfennig, Princeton University, The evolutionary fate of Neanderthal DNA in 30,780 admixed genomes with recent African-like ancestry

• February 20 – Natanael Spisak, Columbia University, Collateral mutagenesis funnels multiple sources of DNA damage into a ubiquitous mutational signature

• March 13 - Marta Farré, University of Kent, TBA

• March 20 - Anastasia Ignatieva, University of Oxford, The Length of Haplotype Blocks and Signals of Structural Variation in Reconstructed Genealogies

• April 3 - Ammon Corl, University of California, Berkeley, The genetics, evolution, and maintenance of a biological rock-paper-scissors game

• April 10 - Arjun Biddanda, Johns Hopkins University, Common variation in meiosis genes shapes human recombination and aneuploidy

• April 17 - Robin Hofmeister, University of Lausanne, Parental haplotypes reconstruction in up to 440,209 individuals reveals recent assortative mating dynamics

• May 1 - Gayani Senevirathne, Harvard University, The evolution of hominin bipedalism in two steps

• May 15 - Charlotte Wright, Wellcome Sanger Institute, Constraints on chromosome evolution revealed by the 229 chromosome pairs of the Atlas blue butterfly

• May 22 - Yulin Zhang, University of California, Berkeley, Recovering signatures of archaic introgression using ancestral recombination graphs

• May 29 - Sophie Jean Walton, Stanford University, Community coalescence reveals strong selection and coexistence within species in complex microbial communities

All seminars are held on Fridays at 2:00pm ET, in person at the Department of Biological Sciences, University at Buffalo, with a Zoom option available upon request. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to attend remotely.