Gota Morota is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Biology at the University of Tokyo, where he works on quantitative genetics and phenomics with applications in animal and plant breeding. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical approaches for estimation and prediction of complex traits in agricultural species using high-dimensional omic data. He is also interested in applying digital phenotyping technologies to generate new phenotypes for genetic analysis. Morota began his career as an assistant professor in the Department of Animal Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before moving to Virginia Tech, where he served as an assistant professor and later an associate professor. He completed his BS in Agricultural Science at Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine and his PhD in Quantitative Genetics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Sean Ryder graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. He studied the mechanisms of RNA folding and catalysis at Yale University’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, earning his Ph.D. in 2001. He conducted postdoctoral research at the Scripps Research Institute, where he was awarded a Damon Runyon Fellowship to study posttranscriptional regulation and RNP assembly. He joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in 2005, where his lab studied maternal mRNA regulation. C. elegans Germline He is a member of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, where he serves as Vice Chair of Outreach. He is committed to fostering understanding and friendship between scientists and the community that supports our work. In 2025, he published the book “Everyday RNA”, an introductory RNA textbook on RNA medicine written for non-specialists.
Guillaume Ramstein is a quantitative geneticist working on the prediction of variable effects and genotype-by-environment interactions in grass species. His research involves using statistical, machine learning, and comparative genomics methods to understand the effect of genetic variation on crop health and adaptability. He also works on experimental validation of variable effect predictions, using targeted and non-targeted mutagenesis techniques. Guillaume received his PhD in plant breeding and plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then did a postdoc on maize and sorghum genomics at Cornell University. From 2021, he is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Center for Quantitative Genetics and Genomics at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Genome Integrity and Transmission Section
Juan Lucas Argeso is a professor of radiation and cancer biology at Colorado State University. His research program investigates broad aspects of structural genomic variation. Saccharomyces cerevisiae Model system. His work spans the fundamental mechanisms of genome rearrangements to the phenotypic consequences of chromosome-scale mutations through homologous recombination. Argeso began doing genetic research in yeast when he was a freshman undergraduate at the University of São Paulo, where he earned a BSc in Agricultural Engineering and an MSc in Genetics and Plant Breeding. He then joined the fields of DNA repair and genomic instability through a PhD in genetics and development at Cornell University, followed by related postdoctoral training at Duke University.
Theoretical Population and Evolutionary Genetics Section
Tim’s research focuses on evolutionary genetics, with an emphasis on mathematical modeling of evolutionary patterns and processes. Tim holds a BA from Rutgers University and a PhD from the University of Michigan and has been a research and teaching academic at Monash University since 2014. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University.
Neurogenetics and Behavior Section
Eli Heckscher is a developmental biologist by training and has been working on problems in the motor system for decades. He did his postdoctoral training with Chris Q. Dove at the University of Oregon, where he helped develop Drosophila Larvae in a model system to study motor circuit assembly. She is particularly interested in how complex motor circuits form, function and evolve. Ely has a special affinity for neural stem cells, muscles and maggots. She is currently an Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago.
