Riley will defend his MS thesis on July 28th, 2026 (Tuesday) at 4 PM Pacific in LSN 101, or via Zoom. Do join us! 

Several of our awesome lab members have secured big awards/scholarships/fellowships this Summer!

• Raya Esplin-Stout, PhD student, won the 2026 University Graduate Fellowship, and 2026 ARCS Fellowship - both from San Diego State University, and the Herman T. and Evelyn W. Spieth Memorial Graduate Award in Biology from UC Riverside
• Kaden Winspear, PhD student, won the 2026 Pam King HAEA Scholarship from the Hereditary Angioedema Association
• Ciera Garcia, MS student, won The Harold & June Grant Memorial Scholarship and Elliott Family Fund Scholarship from San Diego State University
• Cole Gibson and Caroline Walley secured Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) fellowships from San Diego State University

Congratulations to everyone! We are so proud of you all!

~15 years after we published the first ever turtle genome (the Western Painted Turtle, Chrysemys picta), Arun was fortunate to return to his turtle roots and work with Caleb Krueger and team on assembly, annotation, and evolutionary history of the spotted turtle, Clemmys guttata. Check out the manuscript, now out in Journal of Heredity here.

Alex, Jack, Trevor, Margaret, and Arun recently presented work from the lab at the Population, Evolutionary, Quantitative Genetics (PEQG) 2026 meetings in Pacific Grove, CA. Such a grand time for science!

We are so proud of our new grads - Riley Jones, graduating with a Masters in Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics, Caden Mulligan and Zoe Glynn - both graduating with Undergraduate degrees in Biology. Congratulations! We can't wait to see all the awesome things you will do in your bright futures!

Dr. Sethuraman had the honor of representing the lab and joining other faculty members, administrators, construction personnel, and donors to sign the last beam of the building at the "topping-out" ceremony of SDSU's new Life Sciences Building, coming next Fall (2027)! We hope that you will come visit us! More information on the new building here.

Zoe, Ciera, Jack, and Priyanshi presented posters on their research at the recent SDSU Student Symposium (S3)! The largest student symposium across SDSU, this was a prime event that brought together student researchers from across campus, with over 400 presentations. Congrats to all Sethuraman Lab presenters!

Our programmer and Sethuraman Lab alum, Trevor Mugoya received the AGBT's 2026 NextGen Leadership Award at the annual general meeting in Orlando, FL recently. Congratulations to Trevor!

Dr. Sethuraman recently delivered the keynote lecture at the 2026 S3 Awards Ceremony in Montezuma Hall, San Diego State University. Commemorating 10 years of the Sethuraman Lab, his lecture was titled -  "Science of Everything, Everywhere, Everyhow"
Abstract: As the child of two scientists, I have always found that innate itch to question everything, everywhere, and to answer them everyhow. From observing gravid turtles in marshlands along the Mississippi and Missouri, to nail-polish marked larval lady beetles competing for aphids, to clonal 'zombie' wasps that control the brains of their host beetles in my "garage" lab, to assessing disparities among evolutionary biologists in our scientific societies, to discrepancies and biases in our data and how we handle them, to stromatolite mats in the Anza Borrego Desert, to my classrooms. The questions are endless, as are the answers. In this lecture, I will describe how to find that passion to ask the right questions, and how I've trained mentees in my lab to do the same. 
Do check out his lecture here!

Arun has a new op-ed on missing data problems in population genomics and statistical methods to address them, now out in the January 2026 issue of G3. Do check it out here.