Mehrdad Hajibabaei, PhD, University of Guelph, Canada & Founder and CSO, eDNAtec
Dr Hajibabaei is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph, and a molecular evolutionary biologist with experience in ecological/environmental genomics and bioinformatics. He is interested in evolutionary processes at the genomic level and the use of sequence information to investigate biodiversity, ecosystems, and environmental change. Dr Hajibabaei's work spans from molecular evolutionary biology to technology and application development. He has led the use of high-throughput genomics technologies for the assessment of biodiversity in a variety of sample types and settings, and his research has contributed to the field of environmental genomics, DNA barcoding, metabarcoding, environmental DNA (eDNA), biomonitoring, and conservation. Dr Hajibabaei has served on advisory and review panels for major initiatives, international organizations, and major funding agencies.
Jazlyn Mooney, PhD, University of Southern California, USA
Jazlyn completed her undergraduate degree in Biology and Anthropology at the University of New Mexico where she studied human evolution. She completed her PhD in Human Genetics at UCLA in 2020. She was an NSF and CEHG postdoctoral research fellow in Stanford’s Biology department until January 2022. Jazlyn is currently a Gabilan Assistant Professor in the department of Quantitative and Computational Biology at USC, where she focuses on demographic inference and methods development in human and conservation genomics.
Arun Sethuraman, PhD, San Diego State University, USA
Dr Sethuraman is a theoretical and applied population geneticist whose research focuses on developing new statistical methods, software, and pipelines for estimating evolutionary history from large population genomic data. His lab is specifically interested in the genomics of structured populations, with ongoing methodological developments to estimate (1) population structure in the presence of missing genomic data, (2) signatures of linked natural selection versus adaptive introgression, (3) archaic introgression, and (4) relatedness in admixed populations. Dr Sethuraman's lab is currently also working on several applied genomics projects/products to study (a) the evolutionary history of domestication in hops (Humulus lupulus L.), (b) the genomics of invasiveness in introduced beneficial insects (e.g. Coccinellid beetles) and agricultural pests (e.g. pink stem borer moths), and (c) the evolution of modern human genomes in the face of "ghost" hybridization. Methods his lab recently developed include PPP, InRelate, IMa2p, IMGui, and MULTICLUST.
Josefin Stiller, PhD, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Josefin Stiller investigates questions surrounding the evolutionary origins of animal biodiversity. After receiving a BSc from Free University Berlin and a MSc from Humboldt University Berlin, she obtained a PhD in Marine Biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. She carried out postdoctoral studies at the University of Copenhagen in biodiversity genomics of birds as part of the Bird 10,000 Genome Project (B10K). With support from a Villum Young Investigator grant, her research group at University of Copenhagen studies phylogenomics, comparative genomics, and phylogeography, with a current focus on the evolution of seahorses, seadragons and pipefishes and their relatives.
