Population Genomics in Action: The Fantastic Four Superwomen Leading the Charge in Speciation, Polyploidy, and Domestication Research

Abstract:
Work in the Sethuraman Lab focuses on developing new statistical methods, software, and pipelines for understanding population structure, relatedness, speciation, and estimating evolutionary history from population genomic data. Here I will showcase the work of the Sethuraman Lab’s Fantastic Four Superwomen PhD students – (1) Tamsen Dunn’s polyploidy genome simulator and inference framework called SpecKS, (2) Margaret Wanjiku’s series of statistical tests to estimate ghost introgression into extant genomes, (3) Alexandra McElwee-Adame’s work on the genomics of domestication in hops (Humulus lupulus L.), and (4) Raya Esplin-Stout’s pipeline for simulating and testing thousands of coalescent demographic models for use with fastsimcoal28, called CoalMiner.

Speaker:
Arun Sethuraman is an Associate Professor of Population Genetics and Bioinformatics at San Diego State University. Dr. Sethuraman is an evolutionary computational geneticist who develops new statistical methods, software, and pipelines to understand speciation, genomic ancestry, and human evolution out of Africa. He is originally from India, where he completed his Undergraduate studies in Computer Science at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, prior to obtaining a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Genetics from Iowa State University and an NIH Postdoctoral fellowship in evolutionary computational genomics at Temple University with Dr. Jody Hey. More recently, he was a Faculty in the Biology Department at Cal State San Marcos. He is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER and an NIH R15 AREA award, and joined the Biology Department as a Faculty and Director of the Biological and Medical Informatics and the Evolutionary Biology programs at San Diego State University in Fall 2021. He also currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Scholars Program.