Upcoming Speakers

August 1, 2024 – ML/AI & Species delineation

Plenary: Prof Alex Pyron, The George Washington University

Alex Pyron is the Griggs Professor of Biology at the George Washington University. Research in his lab focuses on biodiversity in amphibians & reptiles, from the global scale of species richness across continents, to the speciation process itself across landscapes. He has described over 30 frogs, lizards, salamanders, frogs, and dinosaurs from four continents, through a combination of field, lab, and museum work. His recent computational interests include applying AI/ML techniques to increasingly large datasets to facilitate this process.

June 6, 2024 – Metagenomics & Phylogenetics

Plenary: Dr Lucas Czech, University of Copenhagen

I am a computer scientist who is interested in interdisciplinary work to gain an understanding of the world, and to make it a better place. My interests span across many natural sciences, from astrophysics to evolution. This allows me to communicate efficiently with people from diverse areas, to understand their approaches, and to work together productively. Thus, one of my core strengths is to connect people and ideas from different disciplines.

April 4, 2024 – Protist systematics & evolution

Plenary: Dr Susan Perkins, City College of New York

Dr Perkins's lab studies the diversity, evolution, and genetics of a group of parasitic protists known as haemosporidians, which includes the parasites that cause malaria in humans, but also includes more than 600 other species that use other vertebrates - birds, lizards, bats, ungulates - as their hosts. 

LAST SASSB WEBINAR FOR 2023!

Nov 2, 2023 – Polyploid systematics & evolution

Plenary: Dr Mike Barker, University of Arizona

Dr Barker's lab studies the evolutionary genomics of plant diversity, especially polyploidy, hybridization, and chromosomal evolution. To better understand these evolutionary processes, we also examine many other organisms (insects, microbial eukaryotes, and more).

November 3, 2022 – Systematics

Plenary: Dr Marike Palmer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, United States

I am a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I conduct my research in Microbial Systematics, Molecular Biology and Biodiversity.

June 2, 2022 – Plant systematics and evolution

Plenary: Dr Vinita Gowda, Tropical Ecology and Evolution Lab (TrEE lab), IISER Bhopal

I am an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research in Bhopal, India. I did my PhD at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, USA and postdocs at both the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and Singapore Botanical Gardens. I am an evolutionary biologist and botanist by training and I mostly focus on "plant-centric" projects. My principal interests are to understand the evolution of floral and vegetative traits in plants using molecular, ecological and behavioral tools. Despite its challenges, I also love the wild nature which is why I encourage most projects to be inspired by the forest itself, rather than in shade-houses. 

May 5, 2022 – Bacterial genomic diversity

Plenary: Prof. Luis-Miguel Rodriguez-R – Department of Microbiology & Digital Science Center (DiSC), University of Innsbruck, Austria

My main research interest is the understanding of eco-evolutionary principles governing microbial communities: primary evolutionary and ecologic forces shaping populations and their metabolic potential, their interactions with other microbial species, their hosts, and the environment, and the role of stochasticity. In the pursuit of these questions, I’ve garnered ample experience on genomic and metagenomic analyses in environmental, clinical, agricultural, and engineered settings, including the description, characterization, modeling, and simulation of microbial communities and populations. I’ve explored and discussed both theoretical and practical problems on microbiome analysis including the development and application of methods on phylogenomics, taxonomy of prokaryotes, metabolic modeling, statistical techniques, and sequence analyses.

Additional speakers:

Catherine Brink 

April 7, 2022 – Systematics and Comparative Paleobiology

Plenary: Professor Jonah Choiniere of the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Jonah Choiniere is the Professor of Comparative Palaeobiology at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand. He studies the systematics and evolution of dinosaurs, crocodylomorphs, and their early branching reptilian ancestors. He leads field-based research excavations in South Africa and Zimbabwe to collect new fossil species. His overarching interest is in understanding the effects of the End-Triassic Mass Extinction on planetary biodiversity, which happened 200mya and ushered in the Age of the Dinosaurs. You can find out more from his webpage: http://jonahchoiniere.weebly.com

Additional speakers: 

Dr Kimi Chapelle, Kalbfleisch Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History

Viktor Radermacher, PhD student at University of Minnesota

November 17, 2021 – Systematics & Society

Plenary: Professor Philippe Lemey of the Evolutionary and Computational Virology Laboratory of the Clinical and Epidemiological Virology division at the Rega Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium

Prof Lemey holds a PhD in Medical Sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium (2005), and was a Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellow in the Evolutionary Biology group at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, from 2005 to 2007. Philippe is now a full Professor at the Rega Institute, KU Leuven, where he studies the evolutionary processes that shape viral genetic diversity, spanning large-scale epidemic processes as well as small-scale transmission histories and within-host evolutionary processes. He is the senior editor of the second edition of the Phylogenetic Handbook and a two-time ERC grant awardee. His team contributes to the BEAST software (http://beast.community) for phylogenetic and phylodynamic reconstruction, with applications to many viruses, most notably HIV, influenza, Ebola, Lassa virus and SARS-CoV-2.

SASSB Annual General Meeting to accompany webinar

October 14, 2021 - (Re)discovering known biodiversity imprisoned in scientific publications 

October 15th–  Workshop on data liberation from taxonomic literature using Plazi

presented by Carolina Sokolowicz and Felipe Lorenz Simões (Plazi).

Plenary: Donat Agosti

Donat Agosti is President and founder of Plazi, a Swiss NGO started in 2008. He obtained a PhD in natural sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and undertook postdoctoral fellowships at the Natural History Museum in London, the Australian National Insect Collection, the American Museum of Natural History, and a fellowship at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He specialized in ant systematics, collected ants in over 40 countries, published numerous scientific articles, and co-edited a widely cited handbook on measuring and monitoring biodiversity using ants. In 1995 he developed a website to provide taxonomic data on all the ants of the world (antbase.org), which led to the development of Plazi and its two research infrastructures, TreatmentBank and the Biodiversity Literature Repository, demonstrating the power of providing access to data extracted directly from publications. With Plazi he leads the development of novel means of liberating taxonomic data from the primary literature, including the TaxPub/JATS XML schemas for taxonomic treatments, and more recently, the new MaterialCitation class in the Darwin Core standard which allows for specimens cited in the literature to be linked directly to their occurrence records provided by museums or other sources. He works closely with Pensoft Publishers to implement these tools to automate data extraction from the literature, with over 30 journals now making use of them, including Phytokeys, Zookeys, and African Invertebrates. Plazi also publishes treatment article datasets directly to GBIF, which provide over 80 000 taxon names which do not exist in any other GBIF datasets. He currently lives in Switzerland, has lived and worked in the UK, Australia, USA, Egypt, Iran, and France, due to a better, diplomatic half who, at the same time is one of the main reasons Plazi and many of the advances in access to biodiversity literature materialized. He is father of two sons, neither of whom wanted to become a biologist. He enjoys exploring nature and is an avid iNaturalist user.

Additional speakers (abstracts on Abstract page!):

Ronell R. Klopper,  SANBI

Thembile Khoza, SANBI

September 2, 2021

Plenary: Dr Isabel Sanmartín

The Rand Flora Revisited: New approaches for bridging the micro and macroevolutionary levels in biogeography and evolution

Dr Isabel Sanmartín a senior scientist at the Royal Botanical Garden, CSIC, and an evolutionary biologist interested in the theory and methods of biogeographical inference. One of her research areas is the analysis of macroevolutionary patterns of distributions across a diverse array of organisms (plants, animals, fungi). Another active research area is the development of new analytical tools, especially Bayesian inferential methods, to unravel those processes underlying species distributions. Her latest projects focus on the integration of phylogenomic data into such tools and the use of additional sources of evidence (fossil record, environmental models) to understand the link between climate change, geographic evolution, and extinction.

Additional speakers (abstracts on Abstract page!):

Joanne Bentley, African Climate Development Initiative, UCT

Seth Musker, University of Bayreuth, Germany

August 5 2021

Plenary: Dr Sandra Knapp

Solanaceae – more than potatoes and tomatoes!

Dr Sandy Knapp is a botanist who is a specialist on the taxonomy and evolution of the nightshade family, Solanaceae. She has spent much time in the field collecting plants, mostly in South America. She works at the Natural History Museum, London, where she arrived in 1992 to manage the international project Flora Mesoamericana - a synoptic inventory of the approximately 18,000 species of plants of southern Mexico and the isthmus of Central America. She is the author of several popular books on the history of science and botanical exploration, including the award-winning Potted Histories (2004), and more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. She is actively involved in promoting the role of taxonomy and the importance of science worldwide. Sandy is a trustee of several conservation and scientific organisations, and in May 2018 took office as President of the Linnean Society of London. In 2009 she was honored by the Peter Raven Outreach Award by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists for her work in public engagement with science and the UK National Biodiversity Network’s John Burnett Medal for her work in biodiversity conservation; she holds honorary professorships at University College London and Stockholm University. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Nacional de Ciencias in Argentina. Her work in Solanaceae spans biodiversity from taxonomy to phylogenetics and evolution, with a focus on the wild relatives of important solanaceous crops. She is currently working on in-depth taxonomic treatments of members of the family in Australasia and South America and on phylogenetics and diversification of Solanum worldwide.

Additional speakers (abstracts on Abstract page!):

Bianca Ferriera, Wits: Morphometric and molecular analysis of the Senecio achilleifolius complex (Senecioneae, Asteraceae) in South Africa

Frederik Bekker, Stellenbosch: The gigas effect: A reliable predictor of ploidy? Case studies in Oxalis

July 1 2021

Plenary: Dr David Hibbet

Phylogenomic analyses resolve taxonomic ambiguity for two new genera in the Ophiostomatales

Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) is the number one species of cultivated edible mushrooms in the world. In his 1983 monograph, the British mycologist David Pegler recognized three species of Lentinula from Asia-Australasia and two in the Americas. Since then, three more species have been described, two in the Americas and one in Africa (Madagascar). A second African species may occur in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We are using molecular phylogenetics and phylogenomics to understand the diversity and evolution of Lentinula. Phylogenies based on 343 ITS and 116 tef1-a sequences resolve about 14 species-level lineages in the genus. We generated 25 new Lentinula genomes with a broad geographic and taxonomic representation and added 4 published genomes. We also assembled and annotated 60 genomes from Chinese material, previously published as unassembled raw reads. Phylogenomic analyses, including Bayesian coalescent species delimitation approaches, corroborate results based on ITS/tef1-a. East Asian isolates, which correspond to L. edodes s. lato, comprise multiple lineages that may warrant recognition as species. Analyses of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) suggest that there are two major populations of L. edodes s. lato in East Asia. One includes both cultivated and wild-collected isolates, and the other contains only wild isolates. A group of “mixed” isolates contains nearly equal proportions of SNPs assigned to either the cultivated/wild group or the wild group. One interpretation of these results is that there has been introgression from cultivated strains into wild populations, suggesting that shiitake farming poses threats to indigenous biodiversity in Lentinula.

Biography: I am from the state of Massachusetts, in the USA. I attended the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where I received a bachelor’s degree in Botany (1985), then went to Duke University for my PhD, also in Botany (1991). I spent one year in Japan as a postdoctoral fellow at the Tottori Mycological Institute. My next, and much longer, postdoctoral appointment was at the Harvard University Herbaria, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I joined the faculty of Clark University in 1999.

Additional speakers: (abstracts available on Abstract page!)

Wilma Nel, UP/FABI: Phylogenomic analyses resolve taxonomic ambiguity for two new genera in the Ophiostomatales

Aiden Visagie, Stellenbosch/FABI: Isolation and identification of Penicillium from wheat associated agricultural soils

June 3 2021

Plenary: Dr Seraina Klopfstein

Dating trees with fossils

Calibrating molecular trees to reflect absolute time allows us to interpret them in the light of major events in the deep past, such as the movement of continents, a devastating asteroid impact, or the radiation of another group of organisms. The primary source of information for calibrating the molecular clock is the fossil record, which is unfortunately notoriously patchy. The traditional way of dating trees, “node dating”, uses the oldest fossil of a particular group to construct an assumption about the age of its ancestral node. A more recent approach, called “total-evidence dating”, treats fossils as primary data by incorporating them as tips in the phylogeny, relying on a morphological clock to calibrate the molecular tree. I will discuss pros and cons of each method and present simulation results that try to shed light on the morphological-clock assumption. Finally, I will show some insights from an empirical study on my favourite parasitoid wasps, which turn out to be much older than previously appreciated.

Seraina is Curator of Entomology at the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland. She was a postdoc in Australia and is still very enthusiastic about the Austral (entomo-)fauna. Fascinated by the diversity of nature from an early age, she is now a specialist of parasitoid wasps of the family Ichneumonidae – one of the groups for which our knowledge lags most strongly behind the actual diversity. While basic taxonomic research keeps inspiring her to make slight detours into functional morphology, ecology and courtship behaviour, she has also contributed to method development in systematics and phylogenetics, especially with respect to the design of phylogenetic studies and to the calibration of the molecular clock. The latter has recently also sparked her interest in ichneumonid fossils and in the modelling of morphological characters within the framework of total-evidence dating. Currently, she is working on describing more of the unknown past and present ichneumonid fauna, and on dating the tree of these parasitoids in order to obtain a timeline for their co-evolution with their hosts.

Additional speakers: (abstracts available on Abstract page!)

Martin Coetzee, UP and FABI: Molecular dating as a tool to infer the dispersal mechanisms of phytopathogenic genus Armillaria (Basidiomycotina) 

Terry Reynolds Berry, Iziko Museum: A phylogenetic assessment of parasitoid wasps (Ichneumonidae; Banchinae) in the Afrotropical region using total evidence