Dear SMBE Members,

I am delighted to be writing to you on behalf of the SMBE Council to report back that the membership voted strongly in favor of our Values Statement and Code of Conduct. We have now incorporated these in our documentation (see http://www.smbe.org/smbe/ABOUT/ValueStatement.aspx and http://www.smbe.org/smbe/ABOUT/CodeofConduct.aspx).

We pledged earlier to work even harder to promote inclusion, diversity, and equity in SMBE, see https://www.smbe.org/smbe/HOME/TabId/37/ArtMID/1395/ArticleID/93/SMBE-Announcement-What-can-we-do-to-fight-intolerance-racism-and-discrimination-now-and-in-the-future.aspx. The new Values Statement and a Code of Conduct are an important part of this initiative.

Wishing you all a safe and peaceful remainder of 2020 and that the next year will be a better one.

On behalf of the Council,

Marta L. Wayne
SMBE President

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SMBEv 2021 

A Virtual Meeting to Beat All Virtual Meetings
4-8 July 2021 (3-7 July in the United States)

We are in the first stages of developing our plan for our society’s annual meeting. We decided earlier in the year that the meeting this summer will be virtual (Auckland is postponed until 2022). Today, we are asking our membership for volunteers to help organize and deliver SMBE’s first (but probably not last) virtual meeting. 

This is your opportunity to help shape not only this year’s meeting, but future inclusive, distributed, and carbon-friendly society meetings!

What will the virtual conference look like? 

Our 2021 meeting will take advantage of a Hub model, which will allow us to reach and engage our global community. We will have THREE geographically distributed Hubs, one in Australia/Asia, one in Europe/Africa, and one in the Americas. Each Hub will coordinate roughly ⅓ of the Symposia (which will be solicited as normal), which will distribute the timing of the symposia themselves across time zones and encourage as much synchronous participation as possible. 

I want to help organize SMBEv2021! What role can I play?

There are lots of ways for you to get involved! You can volunteer to be a Hub Coordinator, a member of a Hub Team, a Symposium Coordinator, or to help during the conference to ensure that symposia, Q&A, and poster sessions run smoothly. 

We are now inviting proposals for Hub Coordinators and Hub Teams. (Deadline 31 January, 2021)

Hub Coordinators and Hub teams will take on a role similar to the local conference organising committee of in-person meetings, but without the hassle of booking local venues! Hub teams will:

- Collaborate with each other and with liaisons from the SMBE council for decision-making as to online platforms and other logistical aspects (e.g. timing of symposia and plenary talks, planning  “social” events) of SMBEv2021

- Collaborate to solicit symposia and distribute these among Hubs

- Deliver ⅓ of the conference, including ensuring that symposia within that Hub run smoothly, that members b

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As announced earlier on social media, our election for President-elect, Treasurer and two Councillors whose terms will begin on 1 January 2021 resulted in the following appointments:

COUNCILOR: Dr. Josefa González

Dr. González is a tenured scientist at the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) in Barcelona, Spain. She got her PhD at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and continue her training at Stanford University, CA. Dr. González’ research aims at understanding how organisms adapt to the environment. Towards this end, her lab combines omic approaches with detailed molecular and phenotypic analyses to identify and characterize adaptive mutations, and in particular those induced by transposable element insertions. Dr. González is currently serving as an Associate Editor for GBE and has been an active participant at the SMBE meetings since 2004. She is an advocate for collaborative and inclusive science. She is one of the co-founders of the European Drosophila Population Genomics Consortium (droseu.net): a grass-root, collaborative, gender-balanced effort that brings together 61 labs from 27 European countries and beyond. She is also committed to increasing public awareness of science by co-leading a citizen science project (melanogaster.eu) and actively participating in outreach activities.

Josefa González
CSIC Tenured Scientist
Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF)

COUNCILOR: Dr. Katerina Guschanski

Dr. Guschanski is a group leader in the Department of Ecology and Genetic, Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. She is an evolutionary biologist interested in the complexity of biological diversity in wild animals, ranging from individuals, to population and species, to the evolutionary significance of hostassociated microorganisms. To study the evolutionary processes, she travels back in time using museum and archaeological collections. Dr. Guschanski has been a member of SMBE since 2012 and has greatly enjoyed and benefitted from the annual meetings. She acts as reviewer for the society journals MBE and GBE. She feels strongly about creating a nourishing and supportive environment for young researchers within the society, providing mentoring, promoting equality on all levels and specifically addressing barriers faced by women in STEM.

Katerina Guschanski
Associate Professor
Evolutionary Biology Centre
Department of Ecology and Genetics/Animal Ecology
Uppsala University

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These awards provide recognition for outstanding student papers in the two SMBE journals, Molecular Biology & Evolution and Genome Biology & Evolution, in the calendar year prior to the meeting are eligible for nomination.  Award recipients in 2020 for papers published in 2019:

For MBE, Winner: Ayush S Saxena

Evolution of the Mutational Process under Relaxed Selection in Caenorhabditis elegans

MBE Honorable Mentions:

Annabel Beichman

Aquatic Adaptation and Depleted Diversity: A Deep Dive into the Genomes of the Sea Otter and Giant Otter

Qiqing Tao

A Machine Learning Method for Detecting Autocorrelation of Evolutionary Rates in Large Phylogenies

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Dear SMBE Members,

I am writing to you, on behalf of the entire SMBE Council, in response to the hateful acts of racism-fueled injustice and violence. The murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor serve as painful reminders of hate and violence towards the Black community. Recent events in the US have brought long-entrenched structures of systemic racism to the forefront and have inspired demands for long overdue changes to these systems. As an international society, we are particularly grateful for the demonstration of solidarity exhibited by people in cities and countries all over the world-- underscoring the fact that racism is pernicious and intolerable, not just in the US but globally.

In addition to bringing police brutality and racism into sharp focus, the unjust oppression of Black Americans highlights the intersectionality of violence with social justice, public health disparities, environmental justice, and economic equality, even more broadly.  The sizes of these problems are large, and our movements toward change must be even larger and swifter.  Many people and organizations are re-priortizing or elevating the question: what can we do to fight intolerance, racism, and discrimination, now and in the future?  In order to contribute to this collective goal, council members of SMBE have committed to enhance our efforts towards the following ongoing and new initiatives:

Ongoing Initiatives

• diversifying the editorial boards of the society’s two flagship journals, Molecular Biology & Evolution and Genome Biology & Evolution, to achieve great representation of underrepresented groups
• supporting the participation of underrepresented groups in the yearly meeting of the society via travel and carer awards

New Initiatives

• partnering with other organizations and institutions in order to better recruit, serve, and retain a diverse SMBE membership that includes more members from underrepresented groups
• forming a diversity and inclusivity committee that will focus on programming during yearly meetings and year-round to promote equity and inclusion for all members of the society
• re-evaluating the criteria for faculty awards, currently focused on one-dimensional definitions of excellence, in order to expand the recognition of leaders in our field

Furthermore, we commit to not only sharing these goals publicly, but to reporting on progress towards meeting them each year at the annual meeting.  

Neither this statement, nor our future actions as a scientific society, can undo the undeserved brutality, oppression, and discrimination faced by Black Americans, or faced more broadly by racial and ethnic groups historically and today, worldwide. But SMBE exists within a broader society-- a global community of scientists-- and our future actions can be impactful. We are committed to reflecting on these recent events, recognizing systems of injustice globally, re-evaluating past practice and procedures within the Society and its journals, and working on developing new structures to promote the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion that are essential to the success of science and society.

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Iain Mathieson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. His group studies the genetic architecture and evolution of complex traits in humans, with a particular focus on using ancient DNA to provide a direct window onto human history and evolution. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and an M.Phil. in Statistical Science from the University of Cambridge, and a D.Phil. in Genomic Medicine & Statistics from the University of Oxford advised by Gil McVean and Cecilia Lindgren and supported by the Wellcome Trust. He then completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School with David Reich, supported by a fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program. His lab is currently supported by a NIH NIGMS R35 Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, a grant from the Charles E. Kaufman foundation and a Sloan Foundation research fellowship.

Christian Landry is Professor of Biology as well as Biochemistry, Microbiology and Bio-informatics at Université Laval. His research focuses on evolutionary systems biology and evolutionary genomics. He uses experimental, computational and theoretical approaches to study how natural selection, mutations and drift are shaping cellular systems. Christian received a BSc and a MSc working with Louis Bernatchez from Université Laval, a PhD from Harvard University working with Daniel L Hartl and did his postdoctoral work with Stephen W Michnick at Université de Montréal.  He has been holding the Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Cell and Systems Biology since 2015, was elected a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2014 and was awarded the NSERC EWR Steacie Memorial Fellowships of Canada in 2018.  




2020 SMBE Motoo Kimura Lifetime Contribution Award Winner: Brian Charlesworth

Brian Charlesworth is a Senior Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He was born in Brighton, England in 1945. He obtained his PhD in genetics from Cambridge University in 1969, and was a postdoctoral fellow with Richard Lewontin at the University of Chicago, 1969-1971. He subsequently worked at the Universities of Liverpool, Sussex and Chicago, moving from Chicago to E

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