Congratulations to the two recipients of the 2025 SSE Presidents’ Award for Outstanding Dissertation Paper [2], Chase Brownstein and Jorja Burch! Continue reading for more about each of the winning papers.

The genomic signatures of evolutionary stasis 
Chase D Brownstein, Daniel J MacGuigan, Daemin Kim, Oliver Orr, Liandong Yang, Solomon R David, Brian Kreiser, & Thomas J Near
Evolution, Volume 78, Issue 5: https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpae028

In this study, Brownstein and co-authors demonstrate that molecular evolution rates serve as reliable indicators of evolutionary stasis in jawed vertebrate lineages. The study provides crucial insights into the biological mechanisms underlying "living fossils,” species characterized by remarkably low rates of lineage diversification and phenotypic change over time. One of the study’s most significant findings is the direct relationship between molecular evolution rates and the development of hybrid incompatibility. Notably, the study demonstrates that freshwater gar fish lineages can produce viable and fit hybrids despite sharing common ancestry over 100 million years ago – the most ancient divergence time among parental species among multicellular eukaryotic species capable of producing viable hybrids. 

Read the full Open Access article [3].
 

Wright was right: leveraging old data and new methods to illustrate the critical role of epistasis in genetics and evolution
Jorja Burch, Maximos Chin, Brian E Fontenot, Sabyasachi Mandal, Thomas D McKnight, Jeffery P Demuth, & Heath Blackmon
Evolution, Volume 78, Issue 4: https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpae003 [4] 

In this study, Burch and co-authors address one of the foundational questions in genetics and evolutionary biology: the relative importance of additive versus epistatic genetic architectures in shaping phenotypic divergence. Drawing on 1,606 datasets from both plants and animals, this project is the largest of its kind to use a uniform analysis pipeline (information-theoretic, model-averaged LCA). The included datasets span 65 genera and multiple trait classes (life-history vs. morphological). This taxonomic diversity allowed the study to detect broad patterns—for instance, the higher epistatic contribution in animals than in plants and a stronger role for epistasis in life-history traits. The findings have direct relevance for applied fields such as conservation genetics and agriculture, and emphasize that epistatic architectures are crucial in contexts such as domestication, breeding design, and understanding complex diseases.

Read the full Open Access article [5].