Team
Josie Paris– Director 
Colorado State University, US
Personal Page
Arrival: 07 January 2026, Departure: 21 January 2026
Josie is an evolutionary biologist using analytical approaches in ecological genomics in order to integrate knowledge of adaptation into understanding the dynamics and conservation of wild animal populations. Her expertise is in population genomics (RADseq, whole-genome sequencing data), although she also plays with transcriptomics, genome assembly and annotation, and comparative genomics. Josie is currently a Research Scientist working on Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) with Prof. Chris Funk at Colorado State University.. She is also working on lots of other genomics projects!
Mercè Montoliu Nerín – Associate Director
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK
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Arrival: 07 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Mercè’s background is in evolutionary genomics, specially interested in organisms living in symbiosis, and genomic of complex eukaryotric organisms. In her current position, she is exploring the vast dataset of genome sequence data from Darwin Tree of Life in order to find new ways to analyse and study cobionts associated with the organisms sequenced. Among other projects, she is working with lichens, coral associated fungi, lepidopteran eukaryote cobionts, and sea-grass associated cobionts.
Joan Ferrer Obiol – Faculty Liaison
Colorado State University, US
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Arrival: 07 January 2026, Departure: 21 January 2026
Joan is a postdoctoral researcher working with the Bird Genoscape Project at Colorado State University (https://www.birdgenoscape.org/). His research interests are in using population genomics and phylogenomics to learn more about the evolutionary history of birds with a particular interest in seabirds. He is particularly interested in investigating local adaptation and the genetic basis of complex traits such as migratory behaviour in birds combining genomics with ecological data.
Guy Leonard – Lead Developer
Oxford University, UK
Personal Page
Arrival: 07 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
I am a bioinformatician based at Oxford University, with a focus on the evolution and stability of symbiotic relationships in microbial systems. My current research investigates Paramecium bursaria and its intracellular algal symbionts, examining how these relationships evolved. Using high-throughput sequencing, genome assembly, and variant analysis, our group aims to understand how the symbiont transitions from free-living to a host-dependent state, and what genomic changes underpin this shift. Beyond this core project, I contribute to broader questions in eukaryotic evolution, particularly around the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor (LECA), using phylogenomics and pan-genomic approaches. My analyses often involve developing or refining bioinformatic pipelines in R and Bash, with an emphasis on reproducibility and scalability.
Miloš Duchoslav – Content support and local operations liaison
Charles University in Prague, CZ
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Arrival: 07 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Miloš did his PhD in molecular biology of plants, focusing on photosynthesis. As a postdoc, he moved to the field of ecological genomics of plants. He is studying adaptation of plants to toxic soils and parallelism in evolution.
Scott Handley – Coordinator
Washington University, US
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Arrival 1: 10 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Dr. Handley is interested in how viral and bacterial communities impact health and disease in humans. His research program is split between investigating the gut virome and bacterial microbiome in either AIDS or IBD.
Faculty
Dag Ahrén
Lund University, SE
Personal Page
Arrival: 07 January 2026, Departure: 18 January 2026
Dag is interested in microbial interactions between microorganisms and their environment, either in host-parasite systems or on a ecosystem-wide scale. His research is primarily using genome assembly /annotation, single cell genomics, metagenomics and transcriptomics to study population genomics and adaptations to new environmental conditions. He is also head of a team of bioinformaticians supporting researchers in the fields of microbiology, immunology and structural biology
Benjamin Buchfink
Independent scientist, Tübingen, Germany
Personal Page
Arrival: 12 January 2026, Departure: 18 January 2026
Dr. Benjamin J. Buchfink is a German computer scientist and mostly known as the creator of the DIAMOND protein aligner. He did Ph.D. and postdoctoral research at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen, and currently works as an independent scientist. He specializes in algorithm design, performance engineering and AI.
Madeline Chase
Swiss Ornithological Institute, Switzerland
Personal Page
Arrival: 18 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Madeline is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Ornithological Institute with a background in population and speciation genomics. She is interested in using genomic data to reconstruct the history of divergence, and understanding the evolutionary processes involved. Her work has included both plant and avian systems, and she is motivated by a deep fascination in the diversity of life.
Nathan Clark
University of Pittsburgh, USA
Personal Page
Arrival: 19 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Dr. Nathan Clark is an expert in computational and evolutionary genomics with the goal of identifying genetic elements responsible for adaptive change. His lab, together with that of Dr. Maria Chikina, has developed phylogenetic methods used around the world for comparative genomics: Evolutionary Rate Covariation, RERconverge, and PhyloConverge. The lab applies these methods to species with extreme adaptive traits, such as those dwelling at high altitude, underwater, or below ground, with the goal of contributing to the fields of evolutionary biology, species conversation, clinical ophthalmology, and cardiovascular health.
Personal Page
Arrival: 12 January 2026, Departure: 16 January 2026
With a background in computer science and PhD in biophysics, Petr works in methods development and data analysis. He is one of the lead developers of BCFtools/SAMtools/HTSlib and was involved in large-scale sequencing projects such as 1000 Genomes Project, UK10k, or Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD). His research interests are currently focused on investigating the genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Evan Eichler
University of Washington, US
Personal Page
Arrival: 18 January 2026, Departure: 21 January 2026
The long-term goal of Dr Eichler’s research is to understand the evolution, pathology and mechanism(s) of recent gene duplication and DNA transposition within the human genome. Their lab involves the systematic discovery of these regions, the development of methods to assess their variation, the detection of signatures of rapid gene evolution and ultimately the correlation of this genetic variation with phenotypic differences within and between species.
Rosa Fernández
Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC-UPF), Spain
Personal Page
Arrival: 18 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
In my lab we are interested in understanding animal genome evolution with particular emphasis on the origin of terrestrial animal biodiversity from marine ancestors, as well as the understanding of the genomic basis of adaptation to life in caves. For that, we follow an integrative approach involving taxonomy, systematics and ‘omics’ methodologies (such as transcriptomics, phylogenomics, comparative genomics and proteomics). We are also interested in species tree phylogenomic reconstruction of the Animal Tree of Life, with particular interest in several invertebrate lineages.
Brian Haas
Broad Institute, US
Personal Page
Arrival: 16 January 2026, Departure: 21 January 2026
Brian Haas is a Principal Computational Scientist at the Broad Institute. He is one of the authors of the well-known transcriptome assembler Trinity.
Katharina Hoff
University of Greifswald, DE
Personal Page
Arrival: 15 January 2026, Departure: 19 January 2026
Dr Hoff currently works at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and in the Center for Functional Genomics of Microbes at University of Greifswald (Germany). Katharina’s bioinformatics research is about genome, transcriptome and proteome analysis with a focus on genome annotation.
Antoine Limasset
Université de Lille & CNRS, FR
Personal Page
Arrival: 11 January 2026, Departure: 16 January 2026
Dr. Limasset is a tenured research scientist at CNRS who works on genome assembly, read correction, graphs, and data structure.
Camille Marchet
Université de Lille, FR
Personal Page
Arrival: 11 January 2026, Departure: 16 January 2026
Dr. Marchet is a research associate working in BONSAI team (Lille, France). Her work focuses on methods and data structures in sequence bioinformatics, with applications to RNA in particular. After a MSc in Ecology and Evolution from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and an engineering degree in Bioinformatics from INSA de Lyon, she worked as an engineer for two years before obtaining PhD funding in GenScale team (Rennes, France). Her postdoc was in Transipedia ANR with Rayan Chikhi and Mikaël Salson. Transipedia aims at being a transcriptome-encyclopedia, e.g., facilitating indexing, query and exploitation of the numerous publicly available RNA-seq data. She is mostly working on new data structures to index large collections of NGS datasets. Before and during her PhD, she worked on methods for transcriptomics, in particular for de novo variants discovery and RNA long read analysis.
Maliheh Mehrshad
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SE
Personal Page
Arrival: 21 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Maliheh is a group leader at the Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, SLU. Her main research interest is to understand the functional and evolutionary aspects of parasitic interactions among aquatic microbes, specifically multipartite interactions. In Malihehs lab, they combine high throughput multi-omics studies of aquatic systems with intricately designed experimental strategies on cultured multi-parasitic model systems to understand these interactions. They also do experimental manipulations of natural systems.
Claire Mérot
University of Rennes, FR
Personal Page
Arrival: 18 January 2026, Departure: 22 January 2026
Claire Mérot is an evolutionary biologist interested in the importance of genetic architecture in evolutionary processes, with a particular focus on structural variants and chromosomal inversions. She is a permanent researcher at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), and she is based at the University of Rennes, France.
Camilla Santos
Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK
Personal Page
Arrival: 14 January 2026, Departure: 17 January 2026
Dr Camilla Santos is an Evolutionary Biologist with a Molecular Genetics background. She has been working in the Darwin Tree of Life Genome Curation team in Wellcome Sanger Institute since 2023. As a Senior Computer Biologist, she uses Hi-C data to resolve and improve assembly quality, delivering high-quality chromosome level assemblies across several eukaryotic groups to be used as reference genomes. Her main research interests are on gene expression, adaptative stress and chromosome evolution.
Arnau Sebé-Pedrós
Centre for Genomic Regulation, ES and Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK
Personal Page
Arrival: 20 January 2026, Departure: 22 January 2026
I am an evolutionary biologist interested in understanding how genomes and their regulation encode different cellular phenotypes, and how this genotype–cellular phenotype link evolves. My research combines comparative genomics, chromatin biology, and single-cell methods to study cell type-specific genome regulation across the tree of life.
Rachel Steward
Lund University, SE
Personal Page
Arrival: 21 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Rachel is an evolutionary ecologist who has turned to genomics to better understand the molecular mechanisms underlying phenotypic plasticity and how it evolves, with a particular focus on plant-insect interactions. Rachel completed her PhD at the University of South Carolina, where she studied the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a native insect responding to an attractive but lethal novel host plant. As a postdoc, she has been investigating the role of alternative splicing in phenotypic plasticity and polyphenisms, specifically the consequences of splicing plasticity on genetic diversity. Additionally, she works on the genomic basis and gene expression underlying plastic and evolved differences in host plant use in different insect systems, including Pieris and Polygonia butterflies, and most recently, Tephritis peacock flies. Rachel is currently an independent researcher affiliated with the Speciation, Adaptation, and Coevolution (SPACE) group at Lund University
Marcela Uliano-Silva
Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK
Personal Page
Arrival: 14 January 2026, Departure: 18 January 2026
Marcela Uliano da Silva is a Senior Bioinformatician at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and an Associate Professor II at Nord University, Norway. A genome biologist in the Tree of Life Programme, she studies genome evolution across the Tree of Life, focusing on how genic and repetitive content shape the relationship between genotype and phenotype, as well as on reconstructing ancestral chromosomes. She completed her undergraduate, master’s and PhD training in Brazil, held a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin, and then joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute. She is also a TED Fellow and co-chairs the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the Earth BioGenome Project.
Olga Vinnere Pettersson
SciLifeLab, Uppsala University, SE
Personal Page
Arrival: 11 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
With a background in mycology, I began exploring plant-associated fungi, earning an MSc from the University of Latvia and a PhD from Uppsala University. Since 2012, I’ve been fortunate to work at SciLifeLab’s Genomics Platform, supporting researchers with experimental design and next-generation sequencing, especially long-read applications. This has allowed me to contribute to international initiatives like the Vertebrate Genome Project, Earth Biogenome Project, and European Reference Genome Atlas, alongside brilliant colleagues. Currently, I help guide SciLifeLab’s efforts in Biodiversity Genomics Europe and the Planetary Biology Capability, fostering collaboration, open science, and shared progress in understanding biodiversity.
Chris Wheat
Stockholm University, SE
Personal Page
Arrival: 15 January 2026, Departure: 24 January 2026
Chris completed his PhD at Stanford University, where he studied the genetics of flight performance and fitness differences in butterflies, followed by two postdocs (Max Plank Institute for Chemical Ecology, DE; Metapopulation Reseach Group, FI). He has been at Stockholm University since 2013, where he is now a Professor in the Department of Zoology. His research interests are diverse, covering evolutionary and ecological functional genomics, population genomics, coevolution, conservation genomics, and phylogenomics.
Dag Ahrén
David Barnett
Francesco Cicconardi
Vincenza Colonna
Petr Daněček
Sonya Dyhrman
Evan Eichler
Erik Garrison
Brian Haas
Katharina Hoff
Guy Leonard
Antoine Limasset
Camille Marchet
Mercè Montoliu Nerin
Valentina Peona
Fritz Sedlazeck
Rachel Steward
Marcela Uliano-Silva
Olga Vinnere Pettersson
Chris Wheat
Mike Zody
2024
Dag Ahrén
David Barnett
Vincenza Colonna
Petr Daněček
Sonya Dyhrman
Evan Eichler
Rosa Fernández
Erik Garrison
Brian Haas
Katharina Hoff
Guy Leonard
Antoine Limasset
Camille Marchet
Mercè Montoliu Nerin
Fritz Sedlazeck
Oleg Simakov
Rachel Steward
Marcela Uliano-Silva
Chris Wheat
Mike Zody
2023
David Barnett
Aitor Blanco Miguez
Francesco Cicconardi
Sonya Dyhrman
Evan Eichler
Rosa Fernández
Erik Garrison
Brian Haas
Katharina Hoff
Antoine Limasset
Paolo Manghi
Camille Marchet
Mercè Montoliu Nerín
Natalia Nensheva
Fritz Sedlazeck
Doug Scofield
Rachel Steward
Marcela Uliano-Silva
Rob Waterhouse
Chris Wheat
James Whiting
Mike Zody
2022
Dag Ahrén
David Barnett
Kirsten Bos
Rayan Chikhi
Sonya Dyhrman
Malachi Griffith
Brian Haas
Scott Handley
Ilya Korunsky
Guy Leonard
Antoine Limasset
Camille Marchet
Josie Paris
Sophie Shaw
Emiliano Trucchi
Chris Wheat
Mike Zody
2020
Rayan Chikhi
Sonya Dyhrman
Evan Eichler
Kirk Gosik
Malachi Griffith
Brian Haas
Antoine Limasset
Camille Marchet
Christa Schleper
Emiliano Trucchi
Chris Wheat
Kelly Wrighton
Mike Zody
2019
Julian Catchen
Rayan Chikhi
Bill Cresko
Sonya Dyhrman
Malachi Griffith
Brian Haas
Daniel McDonald
Antonis Rokas
Zachary Skidmore
Jacob Steenwyk
Hannah Tavalire
Amy Willis
Mike Zody
2018
Julian Catchen
Rayan Chikhi
Bill Cresko
Sonya Dyhrman
Evan Eichler
Brian Haas
Sarah Hird
Eline Lorenzen
Daniel McDonald
Antonis Rokas
Karthik Shekhar
Mike Zody
2017
Julian Catchen
Rayan Chikhi
Bill Cresko
Sonya Dyhrman
Evan Eichler
Jennifer Gardy
Brian Haas
Daniel McDonald
Paul McMurdie
Ramunas Stepanauskas
Tobias Uller
Chris Wheat
Mike Zody
2016
Julian Catchen
Rayan Chikhi
Bill Cresko
Sonya Dyhrman
Evan Eichler
Toni Galbaldón
Brian Haas
Daniel McDonald
Paul McMurdie
Antonis Rokas
Gosia Trynka
Chris Wheat
Mike Zody