Past and Present Trustees

Current Trustees

Laura Kubatko (2024-Present)
Laura Kubatko is Professor of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology and of Statistics at Ohio State University. She has served on the SSB council and was President-Elect/President/Past-President of the Society from 2020-2022. She was an Associate Editor for Systematic Biology from 2007-2020 and together with Michael Landis, has administered the SSB Mentoring program, now in its third year.  Her research focuses on developing methodology and corresponding software for inferring species trees from phylogenomic data. Specifically, she has considered evolutionary processes such as the coalescent and hybridization/gene-flow in formulating methods for inference. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019.

Emily Jane McTavish (2024-Present)
​Emily Jane McTavish is an associate professor at the University of California, Merced. She's a computational evolutionary biologist who works on linking data sets to answer large scale evolutionary questions. She is a co-PI and lead developer on the Open Tree of Life project, which synthesizes scientific knowledge about the phylogeny of all life on earth. She has been an SSB council member and has served as SSB's Awards director and Treasurer.

Anne Yoder (2023-Present)
Anne Yoder began her life as a biologist when she was a young girl, collecting bugs, frogs, and other interesting creatures in the woods behind her house. This lifelong passion for biodiversity ultimately manifested as a fascination for Madagascar, where she has spent many months of her life in the field studying its extraordinary endemic fauna. She is the Braxton Craven Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Duke University, and for 12 years was the director of the Duke Lemur Center, home to more than 20 critically endangered species of lemur. Her research has been devoted to understanding how the myriad forces of climate, geography, genetics, and ecological interactions have converged to generate the unique and extraordinarily diverse biota of Madagascar. She integrates science and conservation by combining her love of all things genomic with outreach and collaboration with numerous Malagasy colleagues and their students --- many of whom she has known for decades. To support these activities, she has received numerous grants from National Science Foundation, including a CAREER award in 2000, and Guggenheim and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowships in 2018. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2023. She was elected as President of the Society of Systematic Biologists in 2015, an honor that she especially relished as it provided a platform for communicating one of her greatest scientific interests, the power of phylogenetics.

Past Trustees

David Hillis​
David is an evolutionary biologist, and the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. ​He conducts evolutionary analyses in two main areas: empirical studies of molecular evolution, and the development of evolutionary theory and methodology. His empirical work consists mainly of experimental manipulation of viruses, phylogenetic analyses of highly conserved genes, and studies of molecular processes that relate to multigene families. His theoretical work mainly concerns finding the best ways to estimate phylogenies from molecular sequences and on simulations of molecular evolution using supercomputers.

Joel Cracraft​
Joel is the Lamont Curator for the Department of Ornithology in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. He is also the Principal Investigator for the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, and a Professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School. His work on the systematics of birds, speciation analyses, and biogeography are all components of his interests in understanding how biotas originate and change over time, and how one understands patterns and processes of diversification.

Vicki Funk
Vicki Funk was a Senior Research Botanist and Curator at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Department of Botany. She was a world expert on the taxonomy and biogeography of the sunflower family, Compositae, which is the largest family of flowering plants with more than 27,000 species. During her distinguished career, Vicki achieved preeminence in the fields of plant systematics, phylogenetic methods, biogeography, and biodiversity conservation.

Casey Dunn
Casey is a professor at Yale University where he studies animal evolution, with a particular focus on better understanding our most distant animal relatives and the earliest events in the animal tree of life. His research includes field work to collect poorly known animals, often by SCUBA diving and sometimes with remotely operated underwater vehicles. His lab also develops methods and tools for analyzing evolutionary relationships, and uses those relationships to provide an integrated perspective on genomic and anatomical evolution.

David Wagner
David is a professor at the University of Connecticut where his research interests lie mostly in the biosystematics of Lepidoptera and invertebrate conservation. Many of his recent efforts have been treatments of the immature stages of Lepidoptera. Additionally, recent projects relating to invertebrate conservation have examined the importance of early successional habitats to invertebrates, pollinator decline, invasive species impacts, and climate-change threats.
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