OEB Seminar Series: Samuel H. Church

Man in a gray button up shirt

Date and Time

February 26, 2026
03:30PM - 03:30PM EST

Location

Northwest Building, B101, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA

Samuel H. Church 
Assistant Professor
New York University

Sailing jellies and Hawaiian flies: model-clade approaches to evolutionary genomics

Abstract: Evolution endlessly generates biodiversity. Model clades, lineages selected for intensive research into their evolutionary history, present opportunities to examine the evolutionary mechanisms at play across biological scales. Here I present two such clades: sailing siphonophores in the genus Physalia that live at the fascinating and understudied habitat at the open ocean surface; and hundreds of species of flies in the genus Drosophila endemic to the Hawaiian archipelago. Using an integrative phylogenomics approach, we can describe patterns in the distribution of traits within these clades and their implications for the evolutionary processes that generate them.

Host: OEB Graduate Students