Announcing SSB 2026

• SSB 2026 Preview
• Letter from Jeremy Brown
• Travel Awards for SSB 2025
• Diversity Committee Open Seat

Registration Now Open for SSB 2026

Registration for the 2026 SSB Breakout Meeting (Baton Rouge; Jan 9-11) is now open! Our breakout meetings are a smaller, single-society meeting, in contrast to the big Tri-Society Evolution Meetings. These smaller meetings are a great opportunity for students to give a talk in a supportive setting, while also having the attention of everyone attending. Registration is capped at 200 attendees, and early-bird registration costs are $75 for students and postdocs, and $175 for faculty. 

Our theme this January is The Importance of Natural History Collections. The meeting will feature a social event in the famous Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. Additionally, several workshops are set for January 9th. These are a great opportunity to learn about systematics from leading researchers:

• Introduction to Phylogenetics, led by SSB’s Graduate Student and Postdoc (GraSP) Committee
• Open Tree of Life, led by Emily Jane McTavish and Mark Holder
• Rev of the Bayes and Q the Matrix, led by Rosana Zenil-Ferguson
• A Primer for Phylogenetic Casual Inference, led by Orlando Schwery and Josef Uyeda
• NSF Program Officer Meet and Greet, led by April Wright and Lauren Esposito
  

For more information, including lodgings, please see the website. 

A Letter from Lead Meeting Organizer, Jeremy Brown

We are excited to welcome everyone to Baton Rouge for the 2026 Society of Systematic Biologists Breakout Meeting!

January will mark SSB's 6th breakout meeting and the 2nd time we've hosted here in Baton Rouge. Next year's meeting will be particularly meaningful as we highlight "The Importance of Natural History Collections". Collections have been critical to so much research here at LSU, and we know the same is true all across SSB and beyond.

At a time when collections are under threat worldwide, we hope that this meeting will serve as an opportunity to form a community of support and highlight the critical role that collections play in biological discovery - whether discovering new species, fighting disease, or investigating deep-time evolutionary history and dynamics. Registrants to the meeting will have the opportunity to submit contributed lightning talks, and we welcome all topics relevant to the SSB community, but we particularly encourage talks that highlight the use and value of natural history collections.

For those of you who attended SSB 2017 here in Baton Rouge, next year's meeting will feel very familiar. We will use the same format and the same venues. The first day (Fri., Jan. 9th) will focus on workshops and small-group meetings at the Hilton hotel, while the next two days (Sat.-Sun., Jan.10th-11th) will consist of panel discussions, lightning talks, and plenaries at the Manship Theatre. The majority of the meeting will take place in downtown Baton Rouge, but Saturday night will feature an evening social on campus at LSU's Museum of Natural Science. We will celebrate natural history collections in the middle of our own!

SSB members have consistently identified breakout meetings as a key benefit to Society membership, and we are proud to help carry on this tradition. We are working hard to keep registration costs low, while still providing great experiences for everyone who attends. Meeting attendance is capped at 200 participants, which means that everyone will be in the same space to hear every talk and panel discussion. It also means that there will be ample opportunities to network and build community. 

We hope to see you in January!

The SSB 2026 Organizing Committee

Jeremy Brown

Prosanta Chakrabarty

Brant Faircloth

Laura Lagomarsino

Nick Mason

Fabio Mendes

Diego Paredes-Burneo

Greg Thom

Travel Awards for SSB 2026

As with the Evolution Meetings in 2025, our Diversity Committee will be making early career travel awards for #SSB2026. Please see the website for information on how to apply. The Committee expects to make 3-5 awards. 

Diversity Committee Open Seat

If you appreciate the hard work the Diversity Committee does to make awards for our student and postdoc members, please consider applying for their open seat. This is a highly impactful committee for our society, and the commitments we’ve made to making systematics available to all systematists. 

Reviewers Wanted

SSB offers a series of awards throughout the year. These predominantly go to our early career members. Please consider signing up to review awards.