Molecular Ecologists at #Evol2017 —  see you in Portland!

The Portland skyline and Mt. Hood, as seen from the Portland Japanese Garden. (Flickr: Alan)


Evolution 2017 — the joint annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the Society for the Study of Evolution — is already underway in Portland, Oregon, and it’s looking like a terrific week of science already. The program kicked off today with a symposium in honor of Joe Felsenstein, and gets fully underway tomorrow with a day of workshops capped by the traditional public outreach lecture, which will be given by Ann Reid, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education. Regular presentation sessions begin bright and early Saturday morning, and carry on through Tuesday.
Evolution was last in Portland back in 2010, when I was still wrapping up my PhD, a Democratic Congressional majority was working overtime on a bill to expand access to healthcare nationwide, and there wasn’t much to do within a few blocks’ walk of the Oregon Convention Center. Seven years later there’s a streetcar line connecting the Convention Center to hip East Portland spots along Morrison and and Belmont (you can ask the bouncer at Holocene why the name hasn’t changed to ‘Anthropocene’ yet), and across the river in downtown where good things to do and see include Powell’s City of Books and the BridgePort Brewing Company. (Outgroup, the unofficial Evolution-adjacent LGBTQ mixer, will be meeting at BridgePort on Saturday evening.) Just a little further west on the light rail are the Oregon Zoo, where the conference-capping ‘super social’ will be held, and the Portland Japanese Garden, which is lovely in any season. The folks at Dynamic Ecology are compiling food and drink and activity suggestions if you want a more complete list.
TME contributors are packing up and boarding flights or hitting the highway to the Rose City, too — our presentations are listed in the schedule below, in case you want to find and/or avoid us. (You should find us! We’re friendly!) We’ll have updates from the meeting right here on the blog, and many of us will also join the tweeted conference under #Evol2017; you can find our all handles in the sidebar, or follow that hashtag.
Hope to see you there!
Saturday, 24 June

  • 1415, A107-109 — Katie Everson, Caught in the act: incipient speciation in a fossorial mammal from Madagascar, the mole tenrec Oryzorictes hova (Tenrecidae)
  • 1830, EHA-31 (Poster session) — Ethan Linck, A migratory divide in the painted bunting (Passerina ciris)

Sunday, 25 June

  • 0930, C120-122 — Jeremy Yoder, Parallelized local adaptation in lodgepole pine (a title change since registration!)

Tuesday, 27 June

  • 0830, Oregon ballroom 203 — Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, From haploid to diploid, from diploid to haploid, complex life cycles are everywhere, as part of the SSE Spotlight session.
  • 0830, Oregon Ballroom 202 — Kim Gilbert, Mutation load across mating systems: how does load change and how do we best estimate it?
  • 1040, Oregon Ballroom 203 — Rob Denton, Sperm dependence limits niche expansion in unisexual salamanders of varying ploidy, as part of the SSE Spotlight session.

About Jeremy Yoder

Jeremy B. Yoder is an Associate Professor of Biology at California State University Northridge, studying the evolution and coevolution of interacting species, especially mutualists. He is a collaborator with the Joshua Tree Genome Project and the Queer in STEM study of LGBTQ experiences in scientific careers. He has written for the website of Scientific American, the LA Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Awl, and Slate.
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