Dr. Sam Yeaman (University of Calgary) received the 2015 Early Career Award. This award recognizes exceptional accomplishments and promising future research potential in ecology/evolution by scientists early in their careers. As this year’s recipient of the CSEE Early Career Award, Sam Yeaman gave a talk in Saskatoon exploring how local adaptation evolves at the genetic and genomic level:

The genetic and genomic architecture of local adaptation

Species that inhabit heterogeneous environments often respond by genetic specialization to local conditions, with populations evolving phenotypes that confer high fitness in their home environment, but have trade-offs in other non-local environments. Some well-known examples of local adaptation have been found in patterns of colouration in mice inhabiting light vs. dark sands and armour plating in stickleback that colonize freshwater lakes. The research presented by Dr. Yeaman illustrates how population genetic theory can be used to build intuition and generate testable hypotheses about how local adaptation shapes patterns in the genome.

For more information, see Yeaman 2013, PNAS, 110:E1743-E1751.