Pangenomics transforms evolutionary biology

Joana Meier studies why the species richness is so unevenly distributed across the tree of life, particularly how hybridisation and chromosomal rearrangements affect rapid species radiations. After a PhD and postdoc at the University of Bern in Switzerland on cichlid fish speciation, she held two concurrent fellowships at the University of Cambridge in the UK, working on butterfly speciation. Since 2022, she has been leading a group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, combining her group leader position with a Royal Society URF. Her research team focuses on rapid speciation in butterflies and peacock spiders, and she also leads large collaborative sequencing projects like Project Psyche – sequencing reference genomes of all Lepidoptera found in Europe.

Erik Garrison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, Genomics and Informatics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, leading research on computational methods for pangenomics and genome evolution. A core member of the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, he led development of vg, the variation graph toolkit foundational to graph-based genomics. His open-source tools include the PanGenome Graph Builder (pggb) pipeline for constructing pangenome graphs without reference bias. His work has contributed to landmark publications including the first draft human pangenome reference, the first complete human genome assembly, and the Vertebrate Genomes Project. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. Garrison earned his PhD in Genomics from the University of Cambridge in 2019 under Richard Durbin and holds a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University.

The Sudmant Lab seeks to understand the how evolution shapes genome structure, genetic diversity, aging, and other life-history traits in humans and across the tree of life; and how aging in humans and other organisms impacts the fidelity of molecular processes such as mutation and post-transcriptional gene regulation. We use computational, statistical, and experimental approaches to explore these questions across different molecular and organismal scales.

An agronomy engineer and bioinformatician by training, Dr Éloi Durant stumbled into the worlds of pangenomics and visualization research during his PhD at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) in Montpellier, France. After navigating the troubled waters of "What is a pangenome?", "Why are there so many models?" and "Why would anyone want to visualize one, even?", he persevered through world-stopping events to complete his dissertation: Design of novel visual representations and tools applied to plant pangenome visualization.

Drawing on his experience with pangenome graphs, he joined the Visualization & Interaction group at LIST (the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology), which organized EuroVis 2025. His interests have since expanded to (multilayer) network visualization while he continues exploring new ways to represent complex data.

Jana Ebler received her BSc and MSc in Bioinformatics from Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. She did her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany and graduated in 2023. She is currently a postdoc at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Her research interests include genotyping, phasing and pangenomics. She is part of the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC) as well as the Human Genome Structural Variation Consortium (HGSVC), focusing on the construction of pangenomes from human haplotypes, as well as the analysis of structural variation in humans.

Mona arrived at plant science from an unexpected angle. She began in physical anthropology, drawn to the great turning points of human history, and soon found herself modelling the demographic arc of cattle domestication through ancient DNA. That evolutionary thread carried her into a PhD on cereal domestication, where genetic evidence, archaeological insight, and language braided into a deeper story of crops and people. Her postdoctoral work then reached further back in time, into the origins of land plants and the early branching of archaeplastida. In time she moved into plant ecology, where molecular evolution met her enduring affinity for trees. Alongside this scientific path, art remained a steady companion, offering a way to translate complex scientific histories into forms that feel both intuitive and alive.

Laura Kelly is an evolutionary biologist whose research interests centre on using genomic and evolutionary approaches to understand current and future threats to plant health, to inform actions to mitigate these and to determine how plants adapt in the face of new environmental challenges. Her current areas of focus include using pangenomics to uncover the basis of resistance to major tree pests and pathogens, and to understand the evolutionary response of natural populations to new biotic stressors.

Emma Curran is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield. The aim of her research is to understand how natural populations diversify and respond to challenges in the internal and external environment, by employing population genomic, phylogenomic, and pangenomic approaches. She has investigated this in a range of systems, including divergence and convergence of colour pattern signals in stick insects and butterflies, ecotypic variation and adaptation to climate change in grasses, and the role of structural variants during adaptation to whole genome duplication in Brassicacae.

Dr Andy Bachler is a bioinformatic Postdoctoral Fellow in the Australian government research organisation CSIRO. He completed a BSc (Adv) at the University of Sydney and an Honours degree at Monash University before undertaking his PhD at the Australian National University, where he developed the first pan-genome for a major global pest insect, Helicoverpa armigera (Cotton Bollworm). The pangenomic ‘lens’ enabled identification of a previously unrecognised group of resistance genes for the Bt toxin Vip3Aa, which had not been captured using traditional genomic approaches - advancing understanding essential to sustainable agriculture and insect resistance management.

Andy’s current work focuses on improving genome annotations for eukaryotic organisms, using machine learning tools to detect and correct errors in gene models, and enhancing the characterisation of unannotated prokaryotic genes through protein structure rather than sequence. His research supports large-scale comparative and pangenomic analyses across diverse taxa, with applications in biosecurity, agricultural pest management, and the development of more robust genomic resources for applied and fundamental biology.