American Genetic Association Symposium: The Genetics and Genomics of Environmental Change

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Environmental change has been a constant challenge for all organisms throughout the history of life on earth. The striking environmental variation observed from the poles to the equator, from season to season, and from day to night has been met by both physiological and evolutionary adaptations that enable organisms to survive and reproduce. In recent years there has been growing interest and concern over how humans are imposing environmental change on the planet, and how organisms are responding to that change. The goal of the 2009 American Genetic Association Annual Symposium is to bring together leading researchers in the fields of evolutionary genetics and environmental change to discuss current problems and prospects at the interface between these two areas. The application of evolutionary logic and genomic technologies to the new problems in environmental change will be a major theme of the Symposium. Leading researchers in evolutionary, population, and quantitative genetics will discuss how these fields integrate with ecological and geological perspectives on climate change. The 2009 Symposium will be held at Brown University, and funds are requested to enable the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Without a healthy representation of younger researchers from diverse backgrounds, the long term impact of this Symposium will be diminished. In addition, rapid advances in genome sciences are opening a wide range of questions that can be addressed with non-model organisms; may of these will serve as critical indicator species of environmental change in the future. Finally, the Symposium is highly integrative and will bring together geneticists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, ecologists, geologists and environmental scientists to forge a broad new synthesis.