Advisory Board and Editors Evolutionary Studies
Zoltán Tóth
My current research focuses on investigating whether or not the utilization of social information is taxonomically widespread, beneficial in different ecological conditions, and independent of permanent group-living similarly to the exploitation of other biotic or abiotic cues in the environment. I use several model systems to test related predictions in the contexts of foraging and predator avoidance, and build individual-based models to investigate how social information-mediated behavioural adjustments may affect population dynamics and species interactions.
Emanuel Tschopp
Emanuel Tschopp received his MSc in paleontology 2008 at University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his PhD in 2010 at Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, under the supervision of Prof. Octávio Mateus. After postdocs in Portugal, Italy, and the USA, he is now a Humboldt Fellow at University of Hamburg. His main research interests are the dinosaur and lizard systematics and phylogeny with a focus on sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation in the USA, and extant and extinct lacertid lizards. Furthermore, he is an actively working on improving the methodology of phylogenetic analysis based on phenotypic data, and developing approaches to quantify intraspecific variability to use in species delimitation.
Jana M U'Ren
Assistant Professor, Department of Plant Pathology, Washington State University. PhD in Plant Pathology and Microbiology from The University of Arizona. Research focus on the ecology and evolution of fungal endophytes.
Jana Vamosi
I am a biodiversity scientist examining the macroevolution, macroecology, community ecology, and conservation biology of plants. I often incorporate phylogenetic approaches to questions pertaining to the evolutionary ecology of plant-insect interactions.
Sara Varela
I am working on Pleistocene mammal extinctions. Co-developer of R packages to download data from open access databases (rAvis and paleobioDB), and team member of www.ecoClimate.org, an open access repository to access climatic data for the past, present and future.
Thiago M Venancio
Associate Professor (UENF; Brazil), 2010-present; Postdoctoral fellow at NCBI-NIH (USA), 2008-2010; PhD in Bioinformatics (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil), 2004-2008.
My lab focuses on genomic and transcriptomic studies of plants, fungi and bacteria. Our main goals involve the generation and analysis of big biological datasets using computational methods to understand key aspects of living organisms, such as: 1) the evolution of multidrug resistance genes in Fungi; 2) the evolutionary basis of gene essentiality in Bacteria and Archaea; 3) the transcriptional landscape and regulatory apparatus of land plants, particularly legumes.
Todd J Vision
I am Associate Professor of Biology, and Adjunct Professor of Information and Library Science, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Much of my work has been on evolutionary genetics in plants, including ancient genome duplications, phylogenetic analysis of gene family diversification, and structural genomic variation in natural populations. I also have interests in computational biology, particularly the applications of ontologies for reasoning over large scale about phenotypic diversity data, and have been engaged in a number of projects to study and improve the infrastructure for scholarly communication, particularly open research data.
Jennifer Vonk
Jennifer Vonk is a comparative/cognitive psychologist with primary research interests in two overlapping areas: (1) animal cognition and behavior, and (2) animal welfare. The underlying goal of her work is to examine cognitive continuities and discontinuities between humans and both closely and distantly related species. Her current work centers on social cognition, such as theory of mind, prosociality, and reasoning about emotions, as well as physical cognition, such as causal reasoning, analogical reasoning, numerosity, and natural concept formation. More recent work is focused on examining the effects of early life experiences on human and animal decision-making processes.
Graham P Wallis
Professor in Genetics, University of Otago. Past Vice-President, Society for the Study of Evolution. Past Convenor of EEB Panel, Marsden Fund, New Zealand. Past Marsden Fund Council Member. Associate Editor: Pacific Conservation Biology. Past Associate Editor: Evolution, Molecular Ecology. Temminck Fellow, National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, 2008, 2011. Research Interests: hybrid zones, biogeography, molecular evolution, molecular systematics, conservation genetics. Current projects: Adaptive evolution of a larval glycoprotein in galaxiid fishes (with Luca Jovine, Karolinska Institutet); New Zealand biogeography (with Jon Waters & Dave Craw, Otago); Minimising adaptation to captivity for conservation of threatened species (with Catherine Grueber, Univ Sydney); Molecular systematics of European newts (with Pim Arntzen, National Museum of Natural History, Leiden)
Shibiao Wan
Dr. Shibiao Wan is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy, and the Co-Director for the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (BISB) PhD Program at University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC). He is also an Assistant Professor (courtesy) in the Department of Biostatistics at UNMC.
With more than 15 years of experience in machine learning, bioinformatics, and computational biology, Dr. Wan has published >50 articles in top-tiered journals such as Genome Research, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Circulation Research, Briefings in Bioinformatics, and Bioinformatics. Dr. Wan is the Editor-in-Chief for Current Proteomics, and an Editorial Board Member for a series of prestigious journals such as Briefings in Functional Genomics, Heliyon, BMC Bioinformatics, International Journal of Microbiology, PeerJ Computer Science, BioMed Research International, and Computational and Mathematical Methods, and a guest associate editor for multiple high-impact journals including Frontiers in Immunology, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Frontiers in Pharmacology, Biology, Frontiers in Genetics, and Genes.
Dr Wan is a TPC member for >20 machine learning related international conferences including IEEE ICTAI. Dr. Wan is also a reviewer for >70 prestigious journals including Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Nature Computational Science, Science Advances, Nucleic Acids Research, Advanced Science, Cancer Research, Genome Biology, and Genome Medicine. Dr. Wan has received a number of accolades including the Springer Nature Editor of Distinction Award in 2025 by Springer Nature, the New Investigator Award in 2024 by UNMC, the FIRST Award in 2023 by Nebraska EPSCoR, the Outstanding Young Alumni Award in 2022 by HK PolyU as well as the Global Peer Review Awards (top 1%) in “Cross-Field” and “Biology and Biochemistry” in 2019 by Clarivate. Dr. Wan is a member of AACR, ISCB and ACM and an IEEE Senior Member.
Dapeng Wang
Dr Dapeng Wang is a Senior Bioinformatician in Integrative Analysis at the COMBAT consortium at the University of Oxford using multi-omics techniques in combination with the cutting-edge bioinformatic approaches and statistical methods to explore the pathogenesis of COVID-19 and stratification of patients as well as inform the treatment strategy based on genomics information.
Dr Wang received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Shandong University in 2006 and obtained a PhD degree in bioinformatics from the Beijing Institute of Genomics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011. After his graduation, he continued to conduct research at the same institute from 2011 to 2014 and afterwards moved to the UK to take up various roles at the Cancer Institute at the University College London (2014-2016), the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford (2016-2018) and the LeedsOmics at the University of Leeds (2018-2020).
Liang Wang
Prof. Wang is currently a tenured full professor and distinguished medical researcher at Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China, where he leads a research group in intelligent medicine, digital health, and clinical microbiology. He is also an adjunct research fellow at the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, University of Queensland (2023-2026), adjunct research fellow at the Division of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Western Australia (2023-2026), and associate professor (Nov. 2022-Oct. 2025) at the School of Medical and Health Sciences at Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia. Prof. Wang is a supervisor for PhD students at South China University of Technology (SCUT), MSc students at South Medical University (SMU) and Xuzhou Medical University (XZMU), and also supervises PhD students at the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia.
Prof. Wang was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the University of Western Australia in 2014 and received his postdoctoral training at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and Curtin University (Perth, Australia). Prof. Wang serves as an associate editor at Journal of Translational Medicine, Frontiers in Microbiology, and Gene Reports. He also serves as an editorial board member at BMC Microbiology, BMC Bioinformatics, Heliyon (Advisory Member), PLOS One (Academic Editor), Immunity, Inflammation and Disease (Emerging Editor), Translational Metabolic Syndrome Research, Future Integrative Medicine, Frontiers in Bioinformatics, iMeta, and Medicine Advances, etc. Prof. Wang is frequently invited to review manuscripts for multiple journals such as Lancet Digital Health, etc.
Prof. Wang has edited seven books and published more than 130 peer-reviewed papers in international journals such as The Lancet Microbe, npj Digital Medicine, Trends in Analytical Chemistry, ISME J, Journal of Advanced Research, BMJ Health & Care Informatics, etc. He is the recipient of the Rising Star Award in Measurement Science by the American Society for Chemistry and Australia-China Helicobacter Research Fellowship (2019), awarded by the Australia-China Council and Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Barry Marshall.