This wonderful symposium is free of charge and abstracts are welcome until October.

Full information at the website.

About: Our evolutionary history has shaped our genomes and thus our susceptibility to disease. Each patient can be viewed as the result of an evolutionary process that started billions of years ago and continues to this day. Genomic diversity emerges as a signature of this evolutionary process: across phyla, across species, across populations and across cells. Exploiting this diversity to improve human health is the overarching goal of Evolutionary Medical Genomics. This emergent discipline lies at the intersection of two larger disciplines: medical genomics and evolutionary medicine. While medical genomics is providing invaluable insights into human disease, approaching it through the principles of evolution, inspired by evolutionary medicine, promises novel discoveries and methodologies. 

Research in Evolutionary Medical Genomics includes a wide range of topics, all of which have in common their evolutionary approach to understanding and/or tackling human disease. These include personalized medicine, evolution of disease, comparative genomic models of disease, evolution of ageing, cancer evolution, microbial pathogenicity and microbiome-host (co-)evolution, viruses, and evolutionary immunology.

The first symposium of the joint program on Evolutionary Medical Genomics of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (IBE-CSIC), will bring together researchers from all these areas. Recent and ongoing advances in medical genomics and the increasing diversity of available genomes make this symposium very timely to attract both evolutionary biologists working on disease-relevant projects as well as other researchers interested in human health, from biomedical researchers to clinicians, who are intrigued by a novel way of thinking about disease. The talks of the symposium will be accessible to a very broad audience as all the speakers are used to speaking to a non-specialized public and will cover diverse topics as well as the related methodologies and model systems.


Keynote Speakers:

  • Debbie Marks,  Harvard Medical School
  • Sandy Anderson, Moffitt Cancer Centre

Invited Speakers:

  • Aleksandra Walczak, Ecole normale supérieure-PSL
  • Donate Weghorn, Centre for Genomic Regulation
  • Elizabeth Murchison, University of Cambridge
  • Emma Teeling, University College Dublin
  • Astrid Iversen, University of Oxford
  • Isabel Gordo, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência
  • Jamie Blundell, University of Cambridge
  • Peter Sudmant, UC Berkeley
  • Toni Gabaldon, BSC-IRB Barcelona
  • Todd Macfarlan, NICHD-NIH
  • Tony Capra, UC San Francisco
  • Vera Gorbunova, University of Rochester

Scientific Organizers:

  • Amelie Baud, CRG, Group Leader of the EvoMG Program
  • Jonathan Frazer, CRG, Group Leader of the EvoMG Program
  • Mafalda Dias, CRG, Group Leader of the EvoMG Program
  • Manuel Irimia, UPF-CRG, Group Leader of the EvoMG Program


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