As 2018 draws to a close, we can reflect on all that SSE has accomplished this year. Here are a few highlights. Most notably, we co-sponsored the largest Evolution meeting on record—the Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology [1] in August in the beautiful city of Montpellier, France. With ASN and SSB, we continued to improve our support for parents attending our annual meetings, offering free childcare at Evolution 2019 and additional dependent-care funding for invited SSE symposium speakers. We introduced a new tier of Graduate Research Excellence Grants [2] and contributed well over $100K to student research and travel support. We also launched a monthly series of New Faculty Profiles [3] and grew our SSE twitter account (;@sse_evolution [4]) to nearly 5000 followers. We continued to have a voice in public policy [5] and to strive to make our community more international, diverse, and inclusive, including establishing the tri-society Safe Evolution [6] program and a Code of Conduct [7] for our meetings. Finally, we started new initiatives that are just underway, such as hiring an SSE Blog Editor Fellow [8] and forming a new Code of Ethics committee (see below).

It has been an immense pleasure to serve alongside an incredibly engaged and hardworking SSE Council as well as our partner societies, ASN, SSB, and ESEB, to continue to build a strong, diverse, and active evolutionary biology community. I would like to thank those who have served, welcome our newly elected Council members, and hand the reins to Mark Rausher, our incoming President. Here’s to continued success in 2019!