Invited speakers

is currently a teacher of Biogeography at

the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, and a CONICET researcher. His main

work is on diversity informatics, in particular, on spatially explicit

models for historical biogeography, that is, developing (and

implementing) methods for phylogenetic biogeography, in which

geographic ranges of both terminals and internal nodes can be

explicitly mapped in mid-to-high resolution maps. He is also interested on

methods for inferring phylogenies using morphological data, in

particular, and on character weighting.

 

has his main area of research in the development of phylogenetic methods for the treatment of morphometric and morphogeometric data. He is Associate Editor of Cladistic journal. 

has focused on several research lines within paleobotany, with the goal of answering some key questions such as the origin of angiosperms, the evolution of seed plant characters through time, evolution of floras in the Southern Hemisphere, the influence of climate on these floras, and paleoenvironmental reconstructions. She has concentrated in two areas that are related to one another: diversification and evolution of angiosperms and their paleoenvironments during the Cretaceous, and evolution of Late Cretaceous-Tertiary paleofloras of Patagonia, Argentina. These floras provide critical data for understanding the modern biotic distribution of both hemispheres, and will help address several questions such as how, why (climatically), when and where this extraordinary biotic diversity evolved. She has used traditional paleobotanical approaches, modern and cutting-edge laboratory techniques, and combined these with modern analytical methods.

 was initially trained as an arachnologist specializing in mygalomorph spiders (publishing about 30 papers on spider taxonomy, phylogeny, and biology), and began working in phylogenetic and biogeographic methodology in the early 90's. Since then, he has published about 60 papers describing or applying new methods in phylogenetics and biogeography. He is the senior author of TNT, a program for phylogenetic analysis under parsimony, as well as some other programs (Nona, PiWe, VNDM) for phylogenetic and biogeographic analysis.

In 2012  joined the Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte as The Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics. He currently works in the field of pathogen genomics and evolution and co-directs a research center (cipher.charlotte.edu).  Dr. Janies received a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Michigan in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida in 1995.  He worked as a postdoctoral fellow (1996-99) and as a principal investigator (2000-02) at the American Museum of Natural History where he led a team that, using off-the-shelf components, built one of the world’s largest computing clusters in 2001. Dr. Janies was a tenured faculty member in the College of Medicine at the Ohio State University where he served as a national principal investigator in the Tree of Life program of the NSF. Dr. Janies has served the Hennig society as a Vice President.  He is an elected Director of the board of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, and has advised the Obama White House, the Pentagon, and testified to both Houses of Congress.

 is a curator and professor at Colorado State University.  His research consists of two interrelated components: systematics of the plant family Celastraceae, and conceptual aspects of molecular phylogenetics.  The latter include incorporation of gap (indel) characters; the trade-offs of sampling nucleotide or amino acid characters from exons; implications of alternative alignment criteria; incorporation of  multi-gene families into phylogenetic analyses; measurement of phylogenetic signal; the use of phenotypic data when entire genomes are sequenced; improving upon coalescent-based phylogenetic analyses; and artifacts in parametric analyses that are caused by both ambiguous data as well as low quality tree searches.  He is currently an associate editor for both Cladistics and the American Journal of Botany. 

joined the faculty in Entomology at UCR in early 2007 as a systematic entomologist. Her interest is in systematic research of Heteroptera, with an emphasis on Reduviidae, Miridae, and Dipsocoromorpha, on combining morphological and molecular data, and on integrating our systematic knowledge with the evolution of exciting character systems (such as glands), the evolution of prey capture strategies in Reduviidae, and biogeography. She is currently (2020-22) President of the Willi Hennig Society.