EvoDay 2017, Cornell University

The EvoGroup at Cornell recently hosted the annual EvoDay conference, held at the Lab of Ornithology. This year's theme was 'Phylogenomics'. 

Brant Faircloth finishes his presentation as our invited speaker for the Harrison Lecture, a special talk to commemorate the legacy of Rick Harrison.

EvoDay is a one-day conference with the goal of bringing together scientists from upstate New York for a day of talks and discussion. We typically have local speakers from Cornell and surrounding colleges, but this year we looked a little further out -- to LSU, actually! The Danforth lab had the pleasure of hosting Brant Faircloth, who in turn presented a captivating synopsis of his work.

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Each year at EvoDay there is a mix of faculty, researchers, postdocs, and grad students who give ~20 minute presentations at the event, addressing an audience of about 100 people. Past themes have been 'Evolution and Conservation' (2016) and 'Evolution and Behavior' (2015).
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This year, our aculeate working group was well-represented, as both Bonnie Blaimer (Smithsonian) and I presented our latest work based on phylogenies constructed from ultraconserved elements (UCEs).