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April 2025

• SMBE Graduate Student Excellence Awards

The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) awarded Philipp Hummer (Kofler group) for the best presentation at the Graduate Student Excellence symposium, which provides a forum for young investigators to showcase their exemplary research at the annual meeting of the SMBE.

March 2025

• Carl von Schreibers-Researcher Award for young scientists

The Natural History Museum Vienna awarded Sarah Saadain (Kofler group) with the jury prize for her lecture "Cockroaches on a secret mission: What 150-year-old German cockroaches tell us about their world domination".

The purpose of this lecture series is to present the topic in an entertaining and generally understandable way.

Winners from left: Martina Darwich, Sarah Saadain, Manuela Quiroga Pérez, Anna-Chiara Barta

• Sarah Saadain (a second-year student in the Kofler group) was interviewed for the online series VetmedTalks about insects using the air as their habitat (in German). This series explains research in a way the public can understand. She spoke especially about Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths).

 

December 2024: Farewell Neda!

We sadly said farewell to Neda Barghi, who started at the Institute in 2016 as a postdoc and was a group leader 2020-2024. She has moved to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology as a Research Group Leader. We will miss her, but it’s a wonderful move for Neda! Congratulations! Here are some photos from over the years.

​​December 2024: holiday party

We had a lovely holiday party painting mugs and bowls and realizing who are the real artists among us. The pizza later was great too!

October 2024: retreat

This year's retreat was a joint venture between PopGen and the SFB: Polygenic Adaptation. Twenty-eight students, postdocs, and faculty from five institutions met near beautiful Altaussee in the Alps for scientific talks, discussion, hiking, Austrian food, and great views. We're already excited for next year! Thank you Claus Vogl for most of these photos.

September 2024: Sturm Party

Continuing an annual tradition, Christian Schlötterer hosted PopGen students and faculty for a sturm party. Sturm is new wine, only partially fermented (very sweet and a little bubbly). Happy fall!

August 2024: Student fellowship

Major congratulations to PhD student Ioanna Kotari (Borges group), who earned a prestigious 2-year DOC fellowship from the ÖAW (Austrian Academy of Sciences) with her project "PoMo-cod: Integrating Demography and Selection in Codon evolution." 

During this fellowship she will aim to advance evolutionary biology through the development of "PoMo-cod" (Polymorphism-aware phylogenetic Model for CODon evolution). Traditional models often overlook genetic variation within species and other key factors such as demographic changes and selection on synonymous sites. PoMo-cod addresses these gaps by incorporating polymorphisms, population size variations, and GC-bias gene conversion, providing a more comprehensive understanding of evolutionary processes.

Key goals of PoMo-cod include:

• Explicitly modelling positive diversifying selection, which drives adaptation through recurrent amino acid changes.
• Integrating varying demography, GC-bias gene conversion and selection pressures, including those on synonymous sites, for more accurate evolutionary inferences.
• Detecting patterns of diversifying selection in fruit fly and great ape datasets, leveraging their diverse genomic attributes.

By utilising Bayesian and Maximum likelihood frameworks, along with exploring AI and Machine Learning to alleviate some computational burden, PoMo-cod aims to improve computational efficiency and accessibility, enabling more precise analysis of multi-individual and multi-species data. This will benefit the broader scientific community and advance the field of evolutionary research.

July 2024: Farewell Rui!

We were sad to say goodbye to Rui Borges, who has been at the Institute of Population Genetics at Vetmeduni since 2017, first as a postdoc and then as a group leader. But we are also excited for him about his new position as Lecturer in Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at University of St Andrews in Scotland. Congratulations and good luck with the move! His students will continue being affiliated with PopGen Vienna.

    

July 2024: PhD student on radio

Sarah Saadain, a first-year PhD student in the Kofler group, was interviewed in German for a radio show and podcast about insects by the ORF, a local radio and television broadcaster. She is not only studying Drosophila evolution, but also a passionate entomologist!

Spotify links: 
1. Wiener Nachtpfauenauge
2. Kleiner und Großer Leuchtkäfer
3. Große Eintagsfliege
4. Mittlerer Weinschwärmer

ORF links: this is the first episode and on the bottom you can see the other three:
https://sound.orf.at/podcast/oe1/insekten/das-wiener-nachtpfauenauge

July 2024: PhD defenses

Congratulations to two talented fresh PhD graduates! Clara Groot Crego from the Paun lab successfully defended her thesis entitled "Molecular sources of variation and their role in the adaptive radiation of Tillandsia." Hannah Götsch from the Bürger lab successfully defended her thesis entitled "A multilocus model for the adaptation of complex ecological traits, and beyond." Great job both!

L: Dr. Groot Crego, R: Dr. Götsch

    

June 2024: Farewell Julia!

Our beloved PhD program coordinator, Julia Hosp, has moved on after 14 years with us. She will be missed very much! Here are some photos from her farewell party. Special thanks to Petra and Bali for preparing and grilling the feast!

April 2024: PhD defense

We're celebrating the successful defense of Elif Bozlak (Wallner group). Her thesis talk was entitled "Sequence diversity in mammalian Y chromosomes". Congratulations!

February 2024: PhD defense

Burçin Yıldırım (Vogl group) successfully defended her PhD thesis "Adaptive and nonadaptive sequence evolution in short introns of fruit flies of the genus Drosophila". Congratulations!