Date

October 16, 2023

Time

12:00 pm

Location

RW432 & livestream

Guest speaker: Mark Hibbins, Postdoc – Wright Lab
Host: S. Wright

Abstract: Biodiversity arises over macroevolutionary timescales as a consequence of myriad evolutionary forces. Genomes and genome-scale datasets are a tremendous resource for understanding how these forces act and interact, providing information about common ancestry and the link between genotype and phenotype. However, genomes themselves are highly complex mosaics of variable evolutionary histories and forces, and this complexity is seldom incorporated into macroevolutionary analyses. My research develops new theoretical and computational approaches to evolutionary inference that incorporate a fuller understanding of how genomes and long-term evolutionary forces interact.

In this seminar, I will highlight my work on incorporating gene tree discordance and introgression into phylogenetic comparative methods for quantitative traits, overcoming the biases that arise from standard inferences using a fixed species phylogeny. I will then discuss ongoing research into the forces driving rapid sex chromosome evolution and turnover in some groups, resolving the history of sex chromosome evolution in the flowering plant genus Rumex, and investigating the role of chromosomal rearrangements and the landscape of recombination on autosomes in promoting neo-sex chromosome evolution.