Chase Brownstein Receives SSE President’s Award!

EEB graduate student Chase Brownstein has received the 2025 Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) President’s Award for Outstanding Dissertation Paper. His award-winning study, “The Genomic Signatures of Evolutionary Stasis,” published in Evolution, reveals that slow-evolving “living fossil” fishes like gars and sturgeons have the lowest molecular substitution rates among jawed vertebrates—possibly due to enhanced DNA repair. The research also shows that two gar species, separated by over 100 million years, can still produce fertile hybrids, offering new insights into speciation and genomic stability.

Congratulations, Chase, on this outstanding achievement!