population genomics. evolution. bioinformatics.
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Tamsen successfully defended her PhD thesis on May 14th, 2025! Congratulations, Dr. Dunn! We are so proud of you!
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Tamsen will defend her PhD thesis on May 14th, 2025 (Wednesday) at 1 PM Pacific in the Gold Auditorium, Shiley Bioscience Center. Deets in the flyer - do join us!  Arun was recently presented with the 2025 SDSU Department of Biology Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award at the BioBanquet 2025. The memo reads: "In recognition of your demonstrated excellence and contributions to the quality of education in the Biological Sciences at San Diego State University, the Department of Biology is proud to award this Outstanding Teacher/Scholar Award to Arun Sethuraman on this 2nd day of May 2025".
Our new USDA and California ARI funded study describing the evolutionary history, microbial and fungal community composition, and viral resistance in domesticated hops (Humulus lupulus L.) is now out in Molecular Ecology! Congratulations to all the authors - this has been a years-long effort led by PhD student Alexandra McElwee-Adame, and all the greenhouse experiments and measurements were performed by the Fall 2023 class of BIOL 596 Research Methods in Agricultural Sciences at San Diego State University and California State University San Marcos. Check out the article here.
Our new study on the heritability and phenotypic plasiticity of body size in a parthenogenetic wasp (Dinocampus coccinellae) is now published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology! Here we designed an experiment with parthenogenetic lines of D. coccinellae presented with three different host ladybeetle species of varying sizes, across multiple generations to investigate heritability, and plasticity of body size measured via a combination of morphometric variables such as thorax width, abdominal width, and wing length in D. coccinellae. Our results indicate (1) little heritable variation in body size, (2) strong independence of offspring size on the host environment, (3) small mothers produce larger offspring, and vice versa, independent of host. We then model the evolution of size and host-shifting under a constrained fecundity advantage model of Cope’s Law using a Hidden Markov Model, showing that D. coccinellae likely has fitness advantages to maintain plasticity in body size despite parthenogenetic reproduction.
This work has been many years in the making, with all the reciprocal transplant experiments performed out of Alicia Tovar's garage through a year and a half of social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A massive thank you and congratulations to everyone involved! We celebrated Darwin Day 2025 on February 12, 2025 by presenting our science! Thank you to everyone that joined us. Vikky (Sathvika Musuvathy) was recently awarded the 2025 Doris A. Howell Foundation – CSUBIOTECH Research Scholar Award for her project titled, "Predicting indicators of health using large genomic and phenotypic data." Congratulations to Vikky! We are so proud of her!
Margaret successfully defended her PhD thesis proposal and advanced to candidacy recently! Congratulations!
The Sethuraman Lab had a great time presenting our work at PAG32 at the Town and Country in San Diego! Arun gave a lecture in the Molecular Ecology workshop, while Tamsen presented her work on SpecKs at the polyploidy workshop. Until next year! Congratulations to Priyanshi Shah, who recently successfully defended her MS thesis, titled "Cataloging telomeric variation across diverse human populations, and its utility in predicting cancer using supervised machine learning"! Trevor Mugoya and Surangi Jayasinghe also successfully defended their MS theses proposals - congratulations!
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Arun Sethuraman
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