The Sethuraman Lab recently presented our research at the TAGC24 meeting in Washington D.C., with PhD student Margaret Wanjiku giving a talk on her first thesis chapter on a series of statistical tests to detect and account for gene flow from archaic ghost populations, PhD student Alexandra McElwee-Adame presenting a poster on her first thesis chapter on the evolutionary genomics of domestication in hops (Humulus lupulus L.), MS candidate Priyanshi Shah presenting her work on telomere length variation in diverse human populations, and Undergraduate student Scott Monahan presenting work on heritability and plasticity in body size of Dinocampus coccinellae, a parthenogenetic wasp. We also had a grand time being tourists around D.C.! Cheers to more fun science meetings in the future!

Dr. Sethuraman was recently awarded the 2024 SDSU Research, Scholarship, & Creative Activities Mentor Award, which was presented by Dr. Hala Madanat, Vice President for Research & Innovation at the S3 symposium. 

The Sethuraman Lab recently presented results from numerous projects at the SDSU Student Symposium (S3) - Raya on her Undergraduate capstone work, developing a new tool called speciel for developing SNP arrays to identify trout species, Tamsen on her PhD work, utilizing Ks distributions to estimate and distinguish timing of allo- and auto-polyploidization events, and Priyanshi on her MS thesis on quantifying telomere length variation in diverse human populations, and the development of a deep learning framework to estimate tumor status. Priyanshi was awarded the Provost's Award for the Sciences, and Tamsen was awarded the Excellence in Graduate Thesis Award! Congratulations to both of them!

Dr. Sethuraman was recently elected to the Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America, where he will serve from 2024-2026 alongside fellow new electees, Dr. Jason Stajich (UC Riverside) and Dr. Eyleen O'Rourke (University of Virginia). We look forward to continued involvement and leadership in the GSA!

Congratulations to our lab's newest Masters candidate, Priyanshi on successfully defending her thesis proposal on "Predictive modeling of tumor status in The Cancer Genome Atlas data". Watch this space for updates and new discoveries from her research.

Our new invited review on using population genomics to inform conservation is now published in Molecular Ecology Resources! We describe a host of resources, review current methods/methodologies, technologies, software, and best practices for their use. We also provide a series of tutorials/resources for budding conservation genomicists. Do check out the manuscript here. Congratulations to Lauren and the entire ConGen2022 team for this massive work!

PhD student Alex recently received the 2024 California State University Agricultural Research Institute's Nextgen Fellowship, and she joins a cohort of students across the CSU system to study plant resilience in the face of climate change! This fellowship will fund a multi-year field + greenhouse experiment to understand drought tolerance in US-based hop cultivars. Congratulations, Alex!

Tamsen, Alex, Trevor and Priyanshi recently received the Genetics Society of America's Presidential Membership Initiative Award! Congratulations, everyone!