All of our previous Club EvMeds are listed below by year. For full descriptions and recordings, you can browse our Archives or click the link for the specific event page below.
2024-2025
| Date | Title | Speaker | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4/17/2025 | Querying the evolution of bacterial and yeast probiotics in the mammalian gut | Nathan Crook and Alexandra Imre | x |
| 4/2/2025 | Stress responsiveness predicts survival across El Niño in a wild primate | Susan Perry, Sofia Carerra, Irene Gogoy | x |
| 3/19/2025 | Cholera and virulent phages, from coevolution within patients to improved diagnostics | Jesse Shapiro and Abu Sayeed | x |
| 3/5/2025 | Bringing Up Baby | Dr. Paul Turke | x |
| 2/19/2025 | What are the evolutionary considerations of rodent gene drives for conservation and human health? | Dr. Megan Serr | x |
| 1/31/2025 | What Oncologists Can Learn from Farmers | Carlo Maley, Sareh Seyedi, and Silvie Huijben | x |
| 1/09/2025 | Evolution, Medicine, and the Monkey Bars | Luke D. Fannin and Nathaniel Dominy | x |
| 12/03/2024 | The Origins of Cardiovascular Sex Differences: Insights for Women’s Health from Across the Tree of Life | Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz | x |
| 05/14/2024 | An Evolutionary Medicine Approach to Lifestyle Related Factors and Causes of IBS | Mary Shenk & Makenna Lenover | x |
| 05/02/24 | Examining the evolution and interaction of antibiotic-resistance and copper-resistance in bacteria | Pamela Yeh & Sada Boyd | x |
| 04/16/24 | Pathogens through space and time – Lessons from high-throughput screening for ancient pathogen DNA | Csaba Pal | x |
| 04/03/24 | Pathogens through space and time – Lessons from high-throughput screening for ancient pathogen DNA | Martin Sikora | x |
| 03/20/24 | Antimicrobial resistance: biofilms and antimicrobial peptides | Barbora Trubenova & Jens Rolff | x |
| 03/05/24 | APOBEC3 deaminase editing in mpox virus as evidence for sustained human transmission since at least 2016 | Áine O'Toole | x |
| 02/26/24 | Studying evolutionary mismatch: Insights from human mating research | Cari Goetz | x |
| 02/15/24 | Extreme value theory and the probability of extreme novel epidemics | Marco Marani & William Pan | x |
| 01/29/24 | Archaic Introgression Shaped Human Circadian Trais | Tony Capra & Keila Velazquez-Arcelay | x |
2023
| Date | Title | Speaker | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12/13/23 | Perturbing the evolutionary mechanisms and ecological forces underlying drug resistance in cancer and pathogens: evolutionary therapy and formal control | Jacob Scott | x |
| 12/01/23 | Mosquito phylogenomics: understanding host use and disease transmission through an evolutionary lens | NCSU GOHA Leaders: Dr. Sid Thakur, Dr. Meredith Spence Beaulieu, Dr. Michael Reiskind, and Dr. Brian Wiegmann | x |
| 11/17/23 | One Health, travel health, and conservation medicine | Michael Muehlenbein | x |
| 11/03/23 | One Health: Evolutionary and academic perspectives | Frank Rühli | Contact speaker for more information |
| 10/27/23 | Colonialism and the emergence of HIV/AIDS | Jacques Pépin | x |
| 10/19/23 | The accidental evolutionary clinical trial | Joe Alcock | x |
| 10/05/23 | Exploitation of antibiotic heteroresistance to kill pan-resistant bacteria | David Weiss | x |
| 9/27/23 | Altered exposure to symbiotes and associated downstream health outcomes among low-resource communities within high-income countries - a preliminary case study on evolutionary mismatch | Tara Cepon-Robins & Theresa Gildner | x |
| 9/20/23 | An evolutionary perspective on social inequality and health disparities: Insights from the producer–scrounger game | Jonathan Wells | x |
| 9/13/23 | Disparity as identifiability: social determinants of health and a new direction for evolutionary medicine | Brandon Ogbunu | x |
| 8/16/23 | Ancient Pathogen Genomes and What They Reveal About the Colonization of Mexico | María C. Ávila Arcos | x |
| 4/26/23 | From evolution to improved gene therapy and diagnostics | Laurence Hurst | x |
| 2/21/23 | Physiological implications of de novo gene emergence in health and disease | Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis | x |
| 2/8/23 | Evolution of diagnostic-resistant malaria in Africa | Jonathan Parr | x |
2022
| Date | Title | Speaker | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12/14/22 | Bacterial evolution during human infection: adapt and live or adapt and die | Daria Van Tyne and Matt Culyba | x |
| 12/8/22 | Conflict and cooperation in human microbiomes | Siobhán O'Brien | |
| 11/17/22 | Intermittent fasting in the dark: metabolic adaptation and resilience in cavefish | Nicolas Rohner | x |
| 11/2/22 | A tale of two sugars: the epic human story of amylose and lactose | Christina Warinner, Irina Velsko, Alexander Hübner | x |
| 10/24/22 | Does habitual squatting ease childbirth? | Gillian Bentley, John Gorman, Charlotte Roberts | x |
| 10/10/22 | Student Spotlight: Cancer modeling and virus identification | Anuraag Bukkuri and Elise Paietta | x |
| 9/28/22 | On the origins of SARS-CoV-2 | Michael Worobey and Lorena Malpica Serrano (University of Arizona) | x |
| 6/15/22 | The Normal and the Pathological Revisted | Paul Griffiths (University of Sydney) | x |
| 6/9/22 | The mechanisms behind Peto’s paradox: why cancer risk doesn’t scale with lifespan | Orsolya Vincze (Centre for Ecological Research, Hungary), Mathieu Giraudeau (CNRS-La Rochelle Université), and Alex Cagan (Wellcome Sanger Institute) | x |
| 5/26/22 | Moffitt's Evolutionary Tumor Board | Damon Reed, Christine Chung, Joel Brown, and Mark Robertson-Tessi (Moffitt Cancer Center) | x |
| 4/25/22 | Assessing the risk of vaccine-driven virulence evolution in SARS-CoV-2 | Jessica Metcalf and Ian Miller (Princeton) | x |
| 4/7/22 | The evolutionary epidemiology of infectious diseases | Troy Day (Queen's University) | x |
| 3/24/22 | Sequential antibiotic therapy as a potent strategy against bacterial pathogens | Hinrich Schulenburg and Aditi Batra (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology) | x |
| 3/9/22 | Spatial profiling links genetic diversity to immune infiltration in glioblastoma | Michalina Janiszewska (Scripps Research Institute) | x |
| 2/24/22 | Evolutionary medicine helps explain regional differences in pandemic dynamics: immunity, symbiosis, and COVID-19 | William Parker (WPLab, Inc. and XPara Mutual Helminths) and Dawit Wolday (Mekelle University) | x |
| 2/10/22 | Candidate gene studies have taught us little about trait genetics but a lot about the fallibility of the scientific process | Matt Keller (University of Colorado, Boulder) | x |
| 1/18/22 | A Natural History of the Future | Rob Dunn (North Carolina State University) | x |
| 1/11/22 | Control system failures and evolutionary medicine | Robert Perlman (University of Chicago) and Randolph Nesse (Arizona State University) | x |
2021
| Date | Title | Speaker | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12/14/21 | Genetic adaptation to zoonotic viruses: how did chimpanzees adapt to SIV/HIV infections? | Aida Andres (University College London) | x |
| 12/2/21 | The genetic history of the plague: what we learn from ancient pandemics | Johannes Krause (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) | x |
| 11/18/21 | Deciphering the persistence of antimicrobial resistance in the absence of antimicrobial pressure using a One Health approach | Sid Thakur (North Carolina State University) | x |
| 11/4/21 | Can evolution-thinking bring phage therapy closer to standard-of-care? | Paul Turner (Yale) with Benjamin Chan (Yale) and Robert Woods (University of Michigan) | x |
| 10/21/21 | Evolutionary demography sheds light on the allelic spectrum of late-onset diseases | Samuel Pavard (National Museum of Natural History in Paris) and Christophe Coste (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) | x |
| 10/14/21 | How evolutionary behavioural sciences can help us understand behaviour in a pandemic | Ruth Mace, Emily Emmott, and Gul Deniz Salali (University College London) | x |
| 9/21/21 | The durability of immunity against reinfection by SARS-CoV-2: a comparative evolutionary study | Jeffrey Townsend (Yale), Alex Dornburg (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), and Hayley Hassler (Yale) | x |
| 9/9/21 | Alzheimer’s Disease: a case of evolutionary mismatch? | Molly Fox (UCLA) | x |
| 8/24/21 | SARS-CoV-2 transmission bottlenecks and why we care | Katia Koelle and Michael Martin (Emory University) | x |
| 7/21/21 | Understanding evolutionary mismatch at the genomic level | Amanda Lea (Vanderbilt University) | x |
| 6/29/21 | Of Mice and Elephants: Trade-Offs of Tumor Suppressor Duplication and Body Size Evolution in Afrotheria | Juan Manuel Vazquez (University of California, Berkeley) | x |
| 6/21/21 | Evolution management from a game-theory perspective: can superbugs be forever tamed? | David McAdams (Duke) | x |
| 6/11/21 | Why is human childbirth so difficult? Obstetrics and the evolution of labor | Philipp Mitteroecker and Barbara Fischer (University of Vienna) | x |
| 5/17/21 | Divergent evolutionary roots for posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms | Sarah Mathew (Arizona State University) and Matthew Zefferman (Naval Postgraduate Academy) | x |
| 5/10/21 | The COVID-19 Pandemic and Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Conversation | Dan Blumstein (UCLA), Martie Haselton (UCLA), Joe Alcock (University of New Mexico), and Barbara Natterson-Horowitz (UCLA) | x |
| 4/29/21 | Postdoc Spotlight: antibiotic resistance, early life adversity, and immunogenetic diversity | Kyle Card (Cleveland Clinic), Liz Lange (Duke), and Federica Pierini (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History) | x |
| 4/21/21 | Die young, live fast: is accelerated reproduction an adaptive response to early life adversity in wild baboons? | Elizabeth Archie and Chelsea Weibel (University of Notre Dame) | x |
| 4/5/21 | Causes and consequences of fear of childbirth | Zaneta Thayer (Dartmouth College) | x |
| 4/1/21 | The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous | Joe Henrich with Neal Baer (Harvard) | x |
| 3/25/21 | Harnessing the social lives of microbes to improve human health | Sandra B. Andersen (University of Copenhagen) and Camille Simonet (University of Edinburgh) | x |
| 3/9/21 | 7 Metabolic Myths: Evolutionary Energetics in Human Ecology and Health | Herman Pontzer (Duke) with Erik Willis (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) | x |
| 2/23/21 | Does evolutionary biology have anything to say about how we should use antibiotics? | Robert Woods with John LiPuma (University of Michigan) | x |
| 2/17/21 | HIV and male sexual behavior: a hypothesis and its history | Phil Starks (Tufts University) | x |
| 2/11/21 | How vaccines train the immune system in ways no one expected | Christine Stabell Benn (University of Southern Denmark) | x |
| 1/28/21 | Successful Aging in the Forest: How wild chimpanzees can help us understand the evolution of human aging | Melissa Emery Thompson (University of New Mexico) with Arun Karlamangla (UCLA) | x |
| 1/22/21 | Wealth, inequality, and health in a small-scale subsistence society | Adrian Jaeggi (University of Zurich) and Aaron Blackwell (Washington State University) | x |
| 1/11/21 | Integrating evolutionary dynamics into clinical cancer treatment | Robert Gatenby (Moffitt Cancer Center) with Shelley Hwang (Duke) | x |
2020
| Date | Title | Speaker | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12/1/20 | Age-dependence in evolutionary mismatch | Michael R. Rose (University of California, Irvine) and Grant Rutledge (Tufts University) | x |
| 11/17/20 | Social immunity: cooperative disease defense in social insect colonies | Sylvia Cremer (Institute of Science and Technology Austria) with Nathalie Stroeymeyt (University of Bristol) and Chris Pull (University of Oxford) | x |
| 11/12/20 | The Nature of Fear | Daniel Blumstein (UCLA) | x |
| 11/4/20 | Postdoc Spotlight: Behavioral resistance, antibiotic resistance, and immune tradeoffs | Caroline Amoroso (University of Virginia), Amrita Bhattacharya (Pennsylvania State University), and Angela Garcia (Arizona State University) | x |
| 10/27/20 | Pathogen selection for HLA gene diversity and its consequences for autoimmunity and cancer immunotherapy | Tobias L. Lenz (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology) | x |
| 10/19/20 | How recent characterizations of somatic mutations in humans inform an evolutionary understanding of aging and cancer | James DeGregori (University of Colorado Anschutz) | x |
| 10/13/20 | Survival of the Friendliest | Brian Hare (Duke) | x |
| 10/6/20 | Assessing SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility in 400 species with comparative genomics | Elinor Karlsson (University of Massachusetts) | x |
| 10/1/20 | Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Race: And Why That’s Important for Evolutionary Medicine | Joseph L. Graves, Jr. (North Carolina A&T State University) | x |
| 9/17/20 | Why Sitting Is Not the New Smoking: an evolutionary medical perspective on physical inactivity | Daniel Lieberman (Harvard) | x |
| 9/10/20 | An evolutionary lens on analyzing human birth timing | Abbe LaBella (Vanderbilt University), Abin Abraham (Vanderbilt University), Lou Muglia (Burroughs Wellcome Fund), Antonis Rokas (Vanderbilt University), and Tony Capra (University of California, San Francisco) | x |
| 9/3/20 | Cancer prevalence and life history traits in mammals | Amy Boddy (University of California, Santa Barbara) with Gunter Wagner (Yale) and David Haig (Harvard) | x |
| 8/27/20 | Racial differences in host immune response to Helicobacter pylori virulence factors – does this help to explain the gastric cancer racial disparity in the United States? | Meira Epplein (Duke) and Julia Butt (German Cancer Research Center) | x |
| 8/20/20 | The new tangled bank of disease: from protein space to injection networks and COVID-19 disparities | Brandon Ogbunu (Yale) | x |
| 7/20/20 | Hemoglobin and high-altitude hypoxia: evolution and public health | Cynthia Beall (Case Western Reserve University) | x |
| 7/14/20 | Tracing pathogens through time with ancient DNA | Verena Schuenemann (University of Zurich) | x |
| 7/6/20 | The Evolution of Human Skin Color: What We Know and How We Can Talk About It | Nina Jablonski (Pennsylvania State University) | x |
| 6/30/20 | Coming of Age on Planet Earth: The Nature of Adolescence in Humans and Other Animals | B. N. Horowitz (Harvard, UCLA) | x |
| 6/23/20 | Batural selection: making sense of COVID-19 symptoms and mortality using core principles of evolutionary medicine | Bernard Crespi (Simon Fraser University) | x |
| 6/15/20 | Social determinants of health and survival in humans and other animals | Jenny Tung (Duke), Noah Snyder-Mackler (Arizona State University), and Dan Belsky (Columbia) | x |
| 6/11/20 | Tacit creationism in emotions research | Randolph Nesse (Arizona State University) | x |
| 6/3/20 | The creative role of chance in evolution: fifty years after Jacques Monod | Sean B. Carroll (University of Maryland) | x |
| 5/26/20 | Evolution in the flesh: How cancer cells evolve to cheat the foundations of multicellular cooperation and what this means for cancer treatment and prevention | Athena Aktipis (Arizona State University) | x |
| 5/18/20 | Lessons from 3.5 billion years of life: what biological evolution tells us about success in countering catastrophic risks | Daniel Blumstein (UCLA) and Terence Taylor (International Council for the Life Sciences) | x |
| 5/15/20 | Harmful or helpful? Cytokine storms examined in light of evolution | Joe Alcock (University of New Mexico) | x |
| 5/7/20 | The behavioral immune system and fear of COVID-19 | Alfonso Troisi (University of Rome Tor Vergata) | x |
| 5/1/20 | Social distancing in the animal kingdom | Julia Buck (University of North Carolina, Wilmington) and Dana Hawley (Virginia Tech) | x |
| 4/14/20 | Ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2: an evolutionary medicine challenge for research and teaching | Vaughn Cooper (University of Pittsburgh) | x |
| 4/8/20 | One Health perspectives on the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 | Kevin Olival and Hongying Li (EcoHealth Alliance) | x |
| 4/2/20 | Teaching evolution in the time of COVID-19 | Jeff Thorne and David Rasmussen (NC State) | x |
