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Anne Yoder is an American biologist, researcher and professor in the Department of Biology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

She 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 received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000, a Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation Biodiversity Leadership Award in 2002, and both Guggenheim and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowships in 2018.
In 2015, she was elected as President of the Society of Systematic Biologists, an honor that she relished as it provided a platform for communicating one of her greatest scientific interests, the power of phylogenetics. Most recently, she has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

She will visit the EDB lab for the first two weeks of October and will give two seminars (on the Thursday 06/10/2022 and Tuesday 11/10/2022), in addition to a couple of lectures for the Masters students :

• Seminar 1. "Cryptic speciation in mouse lemurs" on Thursday 6 October at 10h30, EDB, salle de réunion du 4R1, AND ON ZOOM (link available soon)

Abstract: Cryptic species are perplexing to speciation biologists because the indicators of their species diversity are hidden to the human eye. Such is the case with Madagascar's mouse lemurs (genus, Microcebus). After two decades of intensive research effort into speciation patterns in Microcebus, we have a good understanding of their geographic distribution and phylogenetic diversity, though we know nothing about the biological processes that have generated and maintain this diversity. Our ongoing project focuses on a region of Madagascar that is ecologically heterogeneous and offers a unique opportunity for comparing diverged lineages that occur in patterns of both sympatry and allopatry. We aim to develop and apply a novel and generalizable approach for understanding speciation mechanisms in mouse lemurs specifically, and cryptic species radiations generally. Our project builds on current research that indicates that mouse lemurs probably experienced episodic bursts of lineage diversification consistent with the climatic cycles of the Pleistocene, with many of them having come into secondary sympatric overlap. To discover the processes that have driven and are maintaining lineage diversification we are developing a multidisciplinary approach that 1) includes the development of computational tools for identifying the magnitude, direction, and rate of gene flow among lineages, 2) an investigation of the roles that microhabitat fidelity, metabolic cycles, and sensory communication may play in driving prezygotic reproductive isolation (RI), and 3) the characterization of genomic architecture – from micro- to macro-variations – to investigate how this variation correlates with postzygotic RI. All research activities are tightly interwoven with educational outreach in both the U.S. and Madagascar.

• Seminar 2. "Comparative phylogeography of Madagascar" on Tuesday 11 October at 11h00, EDB, salle de réunion du 4R1, AND ON ZOOM (link available soon)

Abstract: Deducing how, when, and from where Madagascar’s vertebrates arrived on the island is a challenging puzzle. The island’s long isolation has resulted in a fauna that is highly endemic and is taxonomically imbalanced, yet is not typically “African”, as might be expected if the ancestors of these groups arrived by a land bridge across the Mozambique Channel (McCall 1997). Additionally, many species occupy phylogenetic positions that are basal relative to off-island members of their group.  The colonizing ancestors for most vertebrate clades are thought to have rafted, swam, or flown to Madagascar after the island finally became isolated following its breakup with India-Seychelles ~88 Ma). Molecular data suggests that the ancestral source area was Africa, thus requiring passage across the Mozambique Channel. Madagascar’s four extant non-volant native land mammal groups – lemuroids, carnivorans, tenrecs, and nesomyine rodents – arrived during the Cenozoic through separate colonization event.In examining patterns of post-arrival diversification, we have concluded that patterns are influenced by a combination of diversification processes rather than by a single predominant mechanism. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ model does not exist. By developing a novel method for examining and synthesizing spatial parameters such as species richness, endemism and community similarity, we demonstrate the potential of these analyses for understanding the diversification history of Madagascar’s biota.

Yoder Lab website: http://yoderlab.org/

Anne will be in Toulouse the first two weeks of October.
Host researcher in the EDB laboratory : Lounes Chikhi lounes.chikhi@univ-tlse3.fr