Matt Pennell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Biology at Cornell University. He first became fascinated by evolutionary biology while studying at Simon Fraser University, where he did his Honours thesis with Bernie Crespi. He earned his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (2015) from the University of Idaho, where he worked under the supervision of Luke Harmon. He then moved to the University of British Columbia to be an Izaak Killam and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2016), working with Sally Otto, and subsequently, a faculty member in the Department of Zoology from 2016-2022. He was then an Associate Professor in the Departments of Quantitative and Computational Biology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California from 2022-2024 before moving to Cornell. His lab uses phylogenetic trees to understand how complex traits and complex systems evolve long time scales. Work in his lab includes a mix of conducting theoretical studies, building probabilistic and computational models, developing and refining methods, and analyzing comparative data. In recognition of his contributions, he was awarded the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigator Prize from the American Society of Naturalists.

2026 SMBE Community Service Award Winner: Aoife McLysaght

Professor Aoife McLysaght is Chair of Evolutionary Genetics in Trinity College Dublin. She was a member of the international consortium that published the first draft of the Human Genome sequence in 2001; was the first to discover novel human-specific genes, in 2009; identified links between gene duplication patterns and human disease; and has made significant contributions to our understanding of the human genome, as well as the genomes of other animals, plants and viruses. She has a particular interest in whole genome duplication (WGD) and has made key contributions to comparative genomic methods to detect WGD, especially ancient events in vertebrates, as well as important contributions to the theory and conceptual framework for the evolutionary impacts of WGD and how this is manifested in a genome.

Aoife has led a research team in Trinity College since 2003 and has been funded through a prestigious President of Ireland Young Researcher Award (PIYRA), a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Researcher Award and an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Aoife takes a keen interest in communicating science to the public in an engaging and accessible manner. She has given many talks at public events, including music festivals, The Royal Institution (London), science festivals, and Brian Cox and Robin Ince’s Christmas Science shows. She is a frequent contributor in the media in Ireland and internationally. She was awarded the UK Genetical Society Haldane Prize for communicating genetics to a general audience. In 2018, with Alice Roberts, she co-wrote and presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, broadcast on BBC.

Aoife served as Associate Editor and then Senior Editor of MBE from 2005-2025; and Associate Editor of GBE 2015-2021. She was President of SMBE in the period 2018-2020, having previously served as Treasurer of that society 2012-2014. During this time, she was involved in two major changes: one was the transition to open access publishing of the two society journals (MBE and GBE) and the other was the establishment of supports for researchers with caring responsibilities (of any kind) so that they can attend the annual scientific meeting of SMBE without financial impediments.

2026 SMBE Lifetime Research Achievements Award Winner: Anne C. Stone

Anne C. Stone is an anthropological geneticist and Regents Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, where she also directs the Center for Evolution and Medicine. She earned her B.A. in biology and archaeology from the University of Virginia and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology at Pennsylvania State University in the 1990s (advised by George Milner and Mark Stoneking). During this time, she also spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in the laboratory of Svante Pääbo at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After a NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship (with Mike Hammer) at the University of Arizona (1997-1998) in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, she held a faculty position at the University of New Mexico before joining ASU in 2003.

Stone’s research uses genetic data from both ancient and modern samples to study the evolutionary history of humans, other primates, and the causative agents of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy. This has included some of the early ancient DNA analyses of human history in the Americas, examination of chimpanzee Y chromosome variation, investigation into selective pressures of starch digestion on amylase copy number, and the discovery that seals brought strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to the Americas pre-European contact. She has received numerous honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences (2016), fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011) and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (2022).

Selection Committee for the 2026 SMBE Faculty Awards:
Belinda Chang (Chair)
Maria Anisimova 
Alison Feder
Yuseob Kim 
Jian Lu 
Mary O'Connell 
Tal Pupko 
Yong Zhang
Ziheng Yang (Past President)