E&E Seminar Series: Pest evolution on human timescales

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ABSTRACT
As genomic data have become increasingly cheap to generate, they have seen a range of new uses for understanding pest populations. This talk will first detail how a big international dataset has been built to track recent evolution in mosquitoes, covering fundamental evolutionary processes such as repeated adaptation and long-distance dispersal as well as applied biosecurity questions such as inferring incursion origins and tracking insecticide resistance evolution. The second part of the talk will show how genomic data can be used to infer the natural histories of poorly understood and enigmatic pests such as the shot-hole borers that have recently invaded Australia. The talk will provide a synthesis of how evolutionary genomic pest studies can be shaped to answer applied and fundamental questions.

BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Schmidt is an evolutionary geneticist, currently employed as an ARC DECRA fellow and lecturer at the University of Sydney. Most of his work focuses on recent evolutionary change in invasive insects, with specific applications in biosecurity and additional themes relevant to conservation. More broadly his work investigates how species adapt and move through changing environments. Thomas received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Melbourne, supervised by Prof. Ary Hoffmann.