This
year's SICB meeting in Phoenix was a great success. As usual there
were many great student talks and posters, and it was a difficult job
for us to choose the winners of this year's best student oral and
poster presentations (see Don's message for the winners!). The DSEB
division continues to promote and encourage students to participate
in the meetings, and this award recognizes those young scholars who
have demonstrated excellence in their research.
It's
hard to believe, but it's time to start thinking about the 2008
meeting in San Antonio. DSEB will be sponsoring two symposia: a
society-wide symposium entitled "Evolution in the Classroom",
and "Crustacean Phylogenetics". The Phylogenetics for
Dummies workshop is still in the planning phase. There is a current
call for half-day symposium for 2008. Please contact the SICB
Program Officer Linda Walters (ljwalter@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu).
Please have ready a title and a list of 7 speakers for 30 minute
presentations in the AM or 4-5 speakers for 30 minute presentations
in the PM. Shorter presentation slots are also possible.
The
deadline for receipt of symposium proposals for 2009 Boston meeting
is August 17, 2007. The divisions will discuss and decide on funding
at the officers meeting in September, so please start developing your
ideas and talking with your colleagues and program officer of your
division. I have already heard one interesting idea for a symposium
but DSEB has the funds to sponsor more than one symposium as well as
Phylogenetics for Dummies. DSEB is interested in expanding this
workshop to include comparative methods, or even focus on topics such
as phylogeography. Again, ideas are welcome to any of the DSEB
officers.
Greetings
fellow DSEB students and post-docs!
First,
I'd like to say a special thanks to all of the student workers at
the annual meeting in Phoenix; the meeting would not have been
possible without you. And to those of you who joined us in Phoenix,
congratulations on a great decision! It was a fantastic meeting;
fabulous presentations and posters, stimulating discussions, and the
best coffee breaks and snacks in recent memory. From the Wednesday
afternoon orientation session to the Saturday evening
student-post-doc social, the annual meeting was informative,
interesting, and fun. All of the events were well-attended; indeed,
it was standing room only at the DSEB-sponsored Phylogenetics for
Dummies workshop on tree-based statistics.
It's
not too early to think about next year's meeting in San Antonio.
DSEB has doubled the monetary award for best student presentation, so
if you have original research that you plan to present, remember to
enter the competition.
It's
also time to think about ideas for the 2009 meeting in Boston. Each
year SICB divisions sponsor symposia that are organized by graduate
students and post-docs; you don't have to be a faculty member to
suggest or organize a symposium. Organizing a symposium is a great
experience; you can develop the symposium you have always wanted to
attend, invite and meet the leading researchers in your field, and it
looks great on a CV. So check the SICB website and consider
submitting an idea.
If
you have any questions regarding student/post-doc activities, please
contact me. Good luck with your spring semester and your summer
field work!
Minutes
of the 2007 DSEB Business Meeting, 5 Jan. 2007, Phoenix
The
meeting was opened by Don Swiderski with a brief intro, after which
Dianna Padilla discussed some ongoing changes at NSF. Specifically,
the NSF Division for Integrative Organismal Biology has morphed into
Integrative Organismal Systems, to emphasize the idea of working to
understand organisms as systems. There was a workshop during the
Phoenix meeting to discuss the change.
Chair
Don Swiderski then announced the 8th International
Congress of Vertebrate Morphology, which will be held this July in
Paris. Abstracts and registration were due February 10.
Secretary
Marta deMaintenon attended the Division Secretaries Meeting at noon
on Jan 5 (after getting lost looking for the room). Most of the
discussion at the meeting was about the changing template of the SICB
web site, and ideas for getting more interesting items in the
divisional web sites. The general upshot is that there's a bunch of
stuff the division can put up, depending on what people want. Photos
and research blurbs, or synopses of student award winners, would be
especially informative.
Chair
Don Swiderski opened a discussion of amending the by-laws to make the
DSEB Program Officer term three years plus one year as Program
Officer - elect, similar to some other divisions. The reason
for doing this is that officer's job is fairly demanding and a
longer term would give the person elected to the role sufficient time
to work with it successfully. No formal resolution was made at
the meeting, but a suggestion was made to put the item before the
membership for a vote.
The
division needs to elect a new Program Officer-Elect starting 2008;
Mike Alfaro volunteered to run, his bio will be available at the end
of this newsletter.
Outgoing
Program Officer Michele Nishiguchi discussed future meeting venues.
The DSEB sponsored symposia for San Antonio (2008) are set, and
symposium ideas are needed for Boston in 2009. There will be more
money available for symposia in future years thanks to a new
endowment. One idea to take advantage of this would be to have "quick
symposia", essentially theme sessions for a group of people who
want to do a series of related talks. Several ideas regarding
potential symposia for 2009 were discussed.
Ideas
are also needed for the Phylogenetics for Dummies workshops,
organized in tandem with DSEB - sponsored symposia. Any ideas on
these can be forwarded to Program Officer Rachel Collin. The Phoenix
meeting featured a workshop on Tree-based statistics.
Student/
Postdoctoral representative Audrey Aronowsky has just started her
term, she is open for any issues that students want to bring up. One
issue, as always, is how to get more students to participate in DSEB;
more on this below.
Chair
Don Swiderski reported that SICB's membership is in good shape, the
number of members continues to grow, and now there is an on line
membership database that can be easily accessed. SICB's budget,
however, is in the red this year and next, in part because
institutional journal subscriptions are decreasing. Another
contributing factor is the amount of money spent on socials, which
are quite expensive. Any ideas to cut costs are welcome!
SICB
has also been asked to provide financial support for symposia at
other meetings, which seems unlikely given the current budget
constraints.
DSEB's
division budget has been increased slightly; ideas were discussed on
ways to spend the budget. Rich Mooi suggested increasing the amount
given for the best student presentation awards (currently $100 each).
Ken
Halanych made a motion to adjust the size of the award
Rich
Mooi amended the motion, to double the award (to $200 each for paper
and poster)
Jon
Norenburg seconded the new motion
The
motion passed, the student award will be adjusted to $200 each for
best student paper and best student poster.
Under
new business, ideas are needed for the division web site. One idea is
to post winning student papers or posters, but posting the
presentations directly could cause problems because they may count as
publications in some instances. So maybe putting up pictures of the
paper or posters would suffice.
Finally,
many thanks to outgoing Program Officer Michele Nishiguchi and
outgoing Secretary Pat Reynolds; their contributions over the years
truly count as going above and beyond the call of duty!
Ken
Halanych made a motion to adjourn, which was seconded, and the
meeting adjourned.
Upcoming Meetings of Interest to the Division
Evolution
2007, the joint annual meeting of the Society for the Study of
Evolution (SSE), the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), and the
American Society of Naturalists (ASN), will be held June 16-20, 2007,
hosted by The Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution
in Christchurch, New Zealand. More info:
http://www.evolution2007.com/
SMBE
2007, the annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology and
Evolution (SMBE) will be held June 24-28, 2007, hosted by Dalhousie
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The meeting is being
co-hosted by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. More info:
https://smbe2007.dal.ca/
Hennig
XXVI, the Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society, will be
held June 28 - July 2, 2007, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, on Bourbon
Street in New Orleans, LA. More info:
http://www.cladistics.org/meetings.html
Elections: Change
to DSEB By-Laws
Officers'
Terms:
A
proposal was made to adjust the term length of the Program Officer,
to be consistent with lengths of terms in the other divisions, and to
give the Program Officer a term long enough to be able to learn how
to run the office effectively.
The
current by-laws read, in Article III section 1:
"The
Program Officer-Elect shall be elected to serve for one year and
shall then successively and automatically become Program Officer for
two years."
It
is proposed that this sentence be changed to:
"The
Program Officer-Elect shall be elected to serve for one year and
shall then successively and automatically become Program Officer for
three years."
Elections: Candidate for Program Officer-elect
Michael
Alfaro
Current
Position: Assistant Professor, School of Biological Sciences,
Washington State University, Pullman, WA (since 2004).
http://alfarolab.sbs.wsu.edu
Education:
2000 Ph.D. Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago,
IL. 1994 M.A. (Biology), Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA. 1999,
B. A. (Dramatic Art), University of California, Davis, CA.
Professional
Experience:
Assistant Professor, School of
Biological Sciences, WSU, 2004 - present
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of
California, San Diego 2003-2004
Phylogenetics Postdoctoral Fellow, UC
Davis 2001-2003
Research Associate, Field Museum of
Natural History, Chicago, 2001- present
Postdoctoral Researcher, Field Museum
of Natural History 2000-2001
Awards
and Honors: 2000 Honorable Mention, Dwight Davis Award. 1997
Lester Armour Graduate Fellowship, Field Museum of Natural History.
SICB
Activities: lifetime member; symposium organizer: Motor Control
of Vertebrate Feeding (Chicago, 2000); co-chair of numerous
contributed paper sessions; published and reviewed papers for
American Zoologist.
Research
Interests:
Phylogenetic
(especially Bayesian) methods
Evolutionary
Dynamics of Functional Traits
Trophic
Evolution in Fishes and Snakes
Five recent publications (of 19):
M. E. Alfaro and M.T. Holder. 2006.
The posterior and the prior in Bayesian phylogenetics. Annual Review
of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 37:19-42
M. E. Alfaro & J. P. Huelsenbeck.
2006. Comparative performance of Bayesian and AIC-based measures of
phylogenetic model uncertainty. Systematic Biology 55 89-96
M. E. Alfaro, D. I. Bolnick, and P. C.
Wainwright. 2005. Evolutionary consequences of a redundant map of
morphology to mechanics: an example using the jaws of labrid fishes.
American Naturalist 165:E140-E154.
M. W. Westneat and M. E. Alfaro. 2005.
Phylogenetic relationships and evolutionary history of the reef fish
family Labridae. Mol. Phyl. Evol. 36:370-390.
M. E. Alfaro S. Zoller, and F.
Lutzoni. 2003. Bayes or bootstrap? A simulation study comparing the
performance of Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and
bootstrapping in assessing phylogenetic confidence. Molecular
Biology and Evolution. 20:255-266
Goals
as Program Officer: It is truly an exciting time to be a
comparative biologist. Phylogenies are becoming increasingly
available for much of the tree of life, providing an expanding
framework for addressing creative and integrative biological
questions. Concomitant with this has been the development of novel
phylogenetic methods and a proliferation of software packages that
make using methods, new and old, easier. As program officer, I would
like to promote integrative sessions and symposia that feature
applications of phylogenetic methods to broad questions in
evolutionary biology. The ‘Phylogenetics for Dummies' program
provides an excellent venue for introducing SICB members across
divisions to phylogenetic methods. As program officer, I would
support efforts to make Phylogenetics for Dummies even more useful by
tying topics to symposia, paper sessions, or to requests from other
divisions. I would also focus on increasing student membership and
participation in DSEB.
Link to officer list on DSEB page