Celebrating SSB

Presidential Letter
New Editor-Elect of Systematic Biology
Mayr Award Winners
New President-Elect, Council of Executive Committee Members
Publisher's Award Winners
Evolution 2025 Wrap-Up

A Letter From Our President

Hello SSB Members,

It was wonderful to see you all at the virtual meetings this past May and the in-person meeting in Athens Georgia last week! Both meetings had excellent turnouts, and in addition to learning a lot, we had a chance to reconnect with old friends and colleagues, meet new people, and have fun!

Past President Corrie Moreau gave a wonderful retrospective, weaving her work on ants and her work to create community together in her presidential address. If you couldn’t watch the virtual meeting talks live, or the IDEA award or presidential plenaries in Athens, please be sure to check out the recordings online!

Speaking of the IDEA award, congratulations again to Jeremy Yoder, who presented his work on the largest LGBTQAI+ STEM survey to date! Additionally, in Athens, we gave awards out to two Ernst Mayr winners and 2 awards for outstanding papers from Systematic Biology! Thanks also to the SSB DEIC for sponsoring professional headshots for folks at the meeting!

Celebrating at the SSB meet-up in Athens, I heard long-time colleagues and friends talking with each other about fieldwork, introgression, the impact of the shifting scientific funding landscape, and genomics sequencing costs; what I saw was the friendship and community of SSB, we are stronger when united!

Stay tuned for information about SSB's standalone meeting, which will be held this January in Baton Rouge, Louisiana!

Best wishes,

Jessica

The Next Editor-in-Chief of Systematic Biology

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Robert Thomson, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Hawaiʻi, has been appointed the next Editor-in-Chief of Systematic Biology. Dr. Thomson brings extensive editorial and leadership experience to the role, having previously served as an Associate Editor for the journal and as a member of the SSB Council. In addition, he is Chair of the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology graduate program at the University of Hawaiʻi and a Research Associate at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Dr. Thomson began his term as Editor-Elect in January 2025, during which he will manage new submissions while working closely with current Editor-in-Chief Dr. Isabel Sanmartín in her final year of service. He will officially assume the Editor-in-Chief position in January 2026, serving through 2028. His final year will overlap with the next Editor-Elect to ensure a seamless leadership transition. We look forward to Systematic Biology’s continuing role as the premier journal in our field under Dr. Thomson’s leadership.

The Ernst Mayr Award is given to the presenter of the outstanding student talk in the field of systematics at the virtual annual meetings of the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB).

This year’s winners are Spenser Babb-Biernacki, Louisiana State University and Zach Heiple, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Because the talks are given in the virtual, they may be enjoyed freely by all! Mayr Sessions One and Session Two are available via YouTube.

Congratulations to our winners, and we encourage all members to sign up to review award applications.

New President-Elect, Council, and Executive Committee Members

Every year, the society runs our elections. This year, a total of eight positions were open: five council members, the Program Director, a Graduate Student Representative, and President-Elect. The elected members will assume their seats in January 2026.

Congratulations to our new council members, Dr. Carrie Tribble (University of Washington), Dr. Jairo Arroyave (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Dr. Hannah Marx (Cornell University), Hannah Wood (Smithsonian Institute) C. Tomomi Parins Fukuchi (University of Toronto).

Dr. Katherine Marske (University of Oklahoma) will assume the Program Director role. Our newest Graduate Student Representative will be Katherin Arango-Gómez (Louisiana State University). And finally, Dr. Meg Daly (Ohio State University) will be President-Elect in 2026. As a reminder, Society Presidents agree to a three-year term, in which they are first President-Elect, then President, then Past-President. This helps ensure that institutional knowledge is retained and passed down effectively.

Congratulations to our new leaders!

Publisher's Award Winners

Every year, the EIC of Systematic Biology chooses two outstanding papers to receive the Publisher’s Award. The authors of these papers must have been students when they conducted the work. This year, Dr. Isabel Sanmartin selected papers by Dr. Xiao-Xu Pang and Dr. Rong Zhang.

Xiao-Xu Pang, Da-Yong Zhang, Detection of Ghost Introgression Requires Exploiting Topological and Branch Length Information, Systematic Biology, Volume 73, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages 207–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syad077

Rong Zhang, Alexei J Drummond, Fábio K Mendes, Fast Bayesian Inference of Phylogenies from Multiple Continuous Characters, Systematic Biology, Volume 73, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages 102–124, https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syad067

Both papers are free-to-read open access. Click the links above to access and read them. For more information about the award, please visit the award page. Congratulations to these excellent authors!

Evolution Wrap-Up

In addition to the Mayr and plenaries highlighted above, SSB hosted a number of special events including:

A special symposium: Machine learning and new inference algorithms: expanding what is possible in evolutionary biology and phylogenetic analysis.
Workshops:
Building models and testing hypotheses in phylogenetic biogeography using RevBayes
Introducción a la estadística bayesianay a la función de verosimilitud en Español
Phylogenomics Software School
Successful Graduate Student Mixers, and an informal social.
Talks by awardees of this year’s Early Career Travel Funds.

Even if you were not able to attend, you can fill out the post-meeting survey.