Keynote Speaker

Dr. Carla Cáceres

Dr. Carla Cáceres is Director of the School of Integrative Biology and a professor in the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign. She has affiliate appointments in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment, the Department of Entomology and the Prairie Research Institute. Her research is focused at the interface of population, community and evolutionary ecology and addresses questions such as how biodiversity influences the spread of infectious diseases. She joined the University of Illinois faculty in 2001 and has been involved in several initiatives aimed at transforming undergraduate education and broadening participation in STEM. She received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University.

Dr. Kristy Deiner

Dr. Kristy Deiner currently holds an appointment as a Scientific Associate at The Natural History Museum in London. Central to her research is understanding the causes of biodiversity loss for ecosystem functioning, with a specific focus on freshwater ecosystems. She has broad experience in the field of Molecular Ecology (e.g., population genetics, phylogeography and systematics) and Conservation Management. Recently, she been developing methods for using environmental DNA (eDNA) to track aquatic biodiversity.  Her seminal work on transport of environmental DNA in rivers has accumulated in the hypothesis that rivers are conveyer belts of biodiversity information in the form of eDNA.

Dr. Felicity Jones

Dr. Felicity Jones is a Max Planck Independent Research Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory in Tuebingen, Germany. Using threespine stickleback fish, her group studies the molecular mechanisms underlying adaptation and speciation in order to understand genome function and constraints on evolution. Felicity has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Queensland, Australia, and a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. As a postdoc she worked for more than 5 years with Prof. David Kingsley at Stanford University building genomic and functional genetic tools for sticklebacks. Since 2013 she has been running her own research group in Germany with a current focus on mechanisms of gene regulation, comparative epigenomics, and recombination in adaptive evolution.