Spring Symposium

CEE Spring Symposium is led and organised every year by a student or a group with guidance from the Committee. This enables students to learn and develop skills they will need in the future.

Our next symposium will be on March/April 2026, please look forward to very interesting discussions. In the meantime please check out our past events.

Past Events

Wednesday 14th May 2025, UCL - “Evo Devo Palaeo: Using development biology to interpret evolution and palaeontology, and vice versa”

Organisers: Qamariya Nasrullah (KCL), Neal Anthwal (KCL), Marco Camaiti (NHML), Lucy Roberts (NHML), Alexandra Hidalgo (CEE) and Ryan Felice (UCL). 

Guest chair: Marta Perera Perez (KCL)

Sponsors: Royal Society Publishing, Helen Eaton (Senior Commissioning Editor of Phil Trans B) and The Genetics Society

  • Jeff Thompson, University of Southhampton - 'Fossils and Developmental Biology Shed Light on the Divergence of Echinoderm Body Plans'
  • Agnese Lanzetti, Natural History Museum London - 'Developing a New Habit: Ontogeny Tracks the Evolution of Aquatic Adaptations in Baleen and Toothed Whales'
  • Fatima Iftikhar, University of Alberta (Canada) - 'The Soft Tissue Behaviour Behind Tooth Resorption in Living Teiids and Fossil Mosasaurs'
  • Margarida Cardoso Moriera, Francis Crick Institute - 'The Evolution of New Organs'
  • Luke Barlow, King’s College London - 'Development of the Pterygoid Complex Sheds Light on the Evolution of Suckling in Mammals'
  • Rory Cooper, University of Sheffield - 'Evolving Patterns: How Molecules and Mechanics Sculpt Diverse Skin Appendages'
  • Tahlia Pollock, University of Bristol - 'Sharp Insights: Untangling'
Tuesday 23rd April 2024, Imperial - ‘The Evolution of Viral Outbreaks: Past, Present and Future’

  • Dr. Diana Erazo Quintero, Université Libre de Bruxelles -  'Contribution of climate change to the spatial expansion of West Nile virus in Europe and future projections'
  • MMath Maria A. Gutierrez, University of Cambridge - 'Evolutionary insights from mathematical modelling of vaccine escape'
  • Dr. Louis Du Plessis, ETH-Zurich - 'Insights into infectious disease dynamics across time and space with phylogenetics and phylodynamics'
  • Dr. Darlan Candido, Imperial - 'Unravelling spatiotemporal heterogeneities of wild and vaccine-derived poliovirus spread: past and present'
  • Dr. Lucy van Dorp, University College London - 'Tracking pathogens in space and time using ancient genomic approaches'
Tuesday 4th April 2017, UCL - ‘Predicting Biodiversity Change and Impacts on Ecosystem Function’

  • Amanda Bates, University of Southampton - 'Functional shifts in rocky reef communities with warming depend on protection from exploitation and range extension by a habitat-altering urchin'
  • Andy Hector, University of Oxford - 'Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: From local to landscape'
  • Felix Eigenbrod, University of Southampton - 'A spatially explicit socio-ecological framework for predicting the effects of landscape structure on ecosystem services'
  • Axel Rossberg, - 'How loss of fish biodiversity affects marine ecosystem functioning'
  • Adriana De Palma, Natural History Museum - 'PREDICTS: from species to function and from space to time'
  • Nathalie Pettorelli, Institute of Zoology
  • Peter Verburg Vrije, UniversiteitAmsterdam
  • Cristina Banks-Leite Imperial College London
  • Michelle Jackson Imperial College London
  • Tim Newbold University College London