Dr. Sethuraman was just awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER Award which will fund the next five years of computational research in our lab! This grant will focus on the development of novel computational methods to deal with three types of missing data - (1) data missing at random due to genotyping or sequencing errors, (2) data missing due to reduced representation sequencing techniques and allele dropout (e.g. RADseq), and (3) data missing due to extinction (e.g. "ghost" variants from extinct lineages into extant sampled lineages). Exciting times!

Our new study on the demographic composition and gaps in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts in three evolution societies (SSE, ASN and SSB) has now been published in Evolution. Read the published article here, and do let us know your thoughts and recommendations for bridging these gaps in the future.

Our long awaited PPP release manuscript has now been accepted for publication in Molecular Biology and Evolution! This paper describes our first release of a comprehensive pipeline for all things population genomics - starting from a VCF file, to performing numerous population genomics analyses. Congratulations to all Sethuraman and Hey Lab folks that have contributed to this project over the years - Andrew Webb, Jared Knoblauch, Apeksha Sukesh Kallur, Nitesh Sabankar, Jonathan Tedjo. You can read the preprint here, and also check out PPP's first release here. This work was funded by NSF ABI 1564659 to Arun Sethuraman and Jody Hey. 

Our lab's latest manuscript that details the lack of phenotypic variation in aphid larval utilization (see boxplot below, showing overlapping intervals in mean weight gain ratios) in two disparate populations of Hippodamia convergens, despite population structure (see admixture plot below, showing split of the CA and KS populations into separate clusters) has now been accepted for publication at Biological Control! Congratulations to Sethuraman Lab members - Bryce Summerhays, Christy Grenier, Roxane Saisho, Ryan Cartmill, Al Rothenberg, Alicia Tovar, Andrew Rynerson, Tanairi Martinez, and Jerrika Scott on this milestone! You can read the preprint of this publication here.

Dr. Sethuraman was recently awarded 2019's "Kerri Mowen Excellence in Faculty Mentoring Award" by CSUSM's President Ellen Neufeldt and Drs. Julie Jameson and Robert Iafe, on behalf of the CUGR (Committee for Undergraduate Research) and Office of Graduate Studies and Research. Kudos to all his amazing mentees for nominating him!

Congratulations to our amazing collaborator, Dr. Elinne Becket and her team for publishing the draft genomes of three bacterial strains isolated from cleanrooms from the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover at NASA! Special congratulations to Sethuraman Lab undergrads, Roxane Saisho, Dylan Steinecke, and Jeff Jaureguy on being co-authors on this manuscript! Read the manuscript here.

The Sethuraman Lab is continuing to science in these crazy times, socially distanced and wearing our PPE in graduate student Alicia's garage. Special thanks to Alicia's mom for hosting us so graciously! Meanwhile, we welcome Walker, Camila, and Tim to the lab this Summer! We sincerely hope that you are all staying safe and sane out there - please take care of yourselves, and yours, and science on.

A 2019 manuscript from the Sethuraman Lab, spearheaded by our talented alums Bryce, Khyati, Nicolette, Christy, Ken, Gwen, and Stefany was recently ranked among the top 10% of all downloaded papers in Molecular Ecology Resources (Impact Factor: 7.05)! Congratulations to all! Read the paper here.

Arun recently presented his and Melissa's work on understanding linked natural selection versus differential introgression effects on regions of modern human genomes up- and down-stream of putatively introgressed Altai Neanderthal haplotypes at the TAGC Online conference, in the session on Demographic Inference, organized by Dmitry Petrov. You can watch the full video of his talk here.

Gwen and Ryan recently presented their research at the CSUPERB Research Symposium in Santa Clara! Congratulations to both of them!