Officially recruiting postdocs at GW. If you are interested in genetic novelty, structural variation, or evo genetics please get in touch! We have data sets on mulitple organisms with large population sizes (Drosophila, Megalonaias nervosa) and species in decline (fireflies, mussels, elephants).

Avocados come in 2 varieties - A-types start each day female and switch to male midday. B-types do the reverse. In work just published from the last chapter of my PhD, we show this system evolved 40+million yrs ago and is regulated by alleles of 1 transcription factor www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Balanced polymorphism in a floral transcription factor underlies the ancient rhythm of daily sex alternation in avocado | PNAS

In avocado and certain wild relatives in Lauraceae, a highly synchronized daily rhythm of floral sex timing promotes cross-pollination between two ...

pnas.org

the egg price thing under biden was all fake lol

🚨Interested in #evolutionary #genomics and #popgen #theory? My lab just opened a 1+ year #postdoc position to work on sex chromosome dosage compensation. At #CEFE Montpellier 👉 bit.ly/4eMWDIh Informal enquiries welcome to me🙂 or Paul Saunders and Sylvain Glémin at #SMBE2026 Thanks for sharing!

1/n Check out our new paper, spearheaded by @fborne.bsky.social, just out in PLoS Genetics doi.org/10.1371/jour....

Epistasis among clustered lineage-specific amino acid substitutions in the Drosophila Trio protein

Author summary Proteins fold into three-dimensional structures that are essential for their function. Because these structures depend on interactions among amino acids, the fitness effect of a mutatio...

doi.org

Just a friendly reminder that SLiM is awesome and lets you do cool things like this with ease. Check out this big collaborative paper (and repo) we wrote to learn more! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... github.com/kr-colab/spa...

Looking forward to all of these Crow Early Career Research Award talks at #PEQG26 starting now.

Why are leaves the shape that they are? What controls intraspecific, genetic variation in leaf shape? New from my lab, in collaboration with many others, led by PhD student Amanda Peake: mapping the leaf shape polymorphism in Ipomoea hederacea.

bioRxiv Plant Bio@biorxiv-plants.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Newly arisen indel governs a leaf shape polymorphism in the Ivy Leaf Morning Glory (Ipomoea hederacea) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.04.730136v1

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

Researchers say the Trump administration is finding new ways to punish science

Even with federal grants largely restored, scientists say the Trump administration is still preventing those funds from reaching them. The consequences, they say, are already becoming clear.

npr.org

Love this quote: "We used to make fun of Edgar Anderson by saying that he was finding hybrids under every bush. Then we realized that even the bushes were hybrids." academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Hybridization and speciation*

Abstract. Hybridization has many and varied impacts on the process of speciation. Hybridization may slow or reverse differentiation by allowing gene flow a

academic.oup.com

Widow’s Bay is great so far. Highly recommend if you wanna scratch a silly+spooky itch.

Our paper entitled "The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians" is now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1.... A really fun and informative collaboration with @mharris.bsky.social, Ziyi Mo and Adam Siepel. (1/n)

The persistence and loss of hard selective sweeps amid admixture in ancient Eurasians | PNAS

The extent to which human adaptations have persisted throughout history despite strong eroding demographic events such as admixture, genetic drift,...

pnas.org

On big picture take away from this work is that it’s a cool system for studying speciation! Lots of neat unknowns here, including better understanding the mechanisms of isolation.

Silas Tittes@silastittes.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Our octopus population genetics preprint is up! This is Gabby Coffing’s final PhD chapter, and turned out pretty cool. Here’s a little explainer. 1/n

Our octopus population genetics preprint is up! This is Gabby Coffing’s final PhD chapter, and turned out pretty cool. Here’s a little explainer. 1/n

bioRxiv Evolutionary Biology@biorxiv-evobio.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Diversity and divergence of two sympatric, sibling octopus species https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.30.721928v1

So psyched for @jrossibarra.bsky.social! Truly a remarkable scientist and person and couldn’t be more deserving of the recognition. www.ucdavis.edu/news/nationa...

National Academy of Sciences Elects UC Davis Maize Geneticist Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra

The National Academy of Sciences has elected Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at University of California, Davis, as a member. His election was announced April...

ucdavis.edu

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

The barnacles are on the loose! Check out my preprint with @stsmall.bsky.social, @johnwares.bsky.social, Erin Jezuit, and Andy Kern: The genome of the Pacific acorn barnacle provides insights into the evolution of extremely large populations doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/n

Please circulate: I will have a postdoc opening soon, ideally with a start date sometime this summer or fall. If you're interested in empirical population genetics, computational methods development, and/or evolutionary modeling via simulation, don't hesitate to reach out. For more info on the lab:

Super awesome paper 👇Coalescence and translation: A language model for population genetics | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Coalescence and translation: A language model for population genetics | PNAS

Probabilistic models such as the sequentially Markovian coalescent have long provided a powerful framework for population genetic inference, enabli...

pnas.org

I'm excited to share that we've made a collection of historic Supreme Court Records and Briefs available via @archive.org I've written a blog post where I go into detail about the importance of this collection. blog.archive.org/2026/04/20/u...

I'm hiring a postdoc (start date flexible) and a PhD student (for Fall 2027) to work in any area of computational phylogenetics! More info here: mhibbins.github.io I will be attending both PEQG and Evolution in June, so please reach out if you want to chat at these meetings!

I am so happy to share this new paper that I wrote with @cegamorim.bsky.social! We hope that it will help encourage dialogue and collaboration between archaeologists and geneticists trying to understand kinship in the past. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧬🧪

Our immigrant loved ones were front of mind as we argued for babies born in the U.S. and everyone who loves them.

Our new experimental evolution study across 30+ locations using the plant Arabidopsis thaliana —— we direct "see" adaptation and extinction to different climates at the genetic as it happens! Read it in Science dx.doi.org/10.1126/scie... @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social @hhmi-science.bsky.social

Alright linguistics nerds, if we survive all this nonsense, and the bots keep improving, how does this change language evolution? More homogeneous or less? My intuition says it reduces pressure to conform, leading to more drifty and rapid changes at local scales. I’m probably very wrong though.

🧪This is important. Russel Vought fact check by @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social When a non-scientist says w/ certainty that NIH caused the Covid19 pandemic, it is a red flag & arrogance. His intention is to destroy science & implement Project 2025. Articles of impeachment have been drafted.

The beautiful preservstion of trilobite compound eyes will never cease to amaze me. On this little 400ish million year old Phacops you can see all the little lenses - each one a rigid calcite mineral crystal! Together they had excellent 360° vision, perfect for finding lunch on the seafloor.

How many teachers are enough? Zero? Hirotaka Goto and I analyze the optimal allocation of dedicated teachers in a population. @carlbergstrom.com www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...