Dear ESEB Members,
Welcome to the December 2025 Newsletter.
Our major activity this year was the success of running the ESEB Congress in Barcelona, which was attended by around 2,000 delegates. We are processing questionnaire returns and will feed back information from this, but it is fair to say that the overwhelming reaction was positive. We all owe great thanks to Toni Gabaldón and his extensive team. A feature of the congress was the enthusiastic presence of our team at the ESEB desk, so special thanks to Nicki Cook, Ute Friedrich, Melinda Modrell and everyone who contributed to promoting ESEB business at the congress.
The congress usually results in turnover of people contributing to ESEB in a variety of roles. We would like to express our thanks to the following for their contributions:
Tracey Chapman, President 2023 – 2025 Astrid Groot, Past President 2023 – 2025 Josefa González, Vice-President 2023 – 2025 Ellen Decaestecker, Secretary 2021 – 2025 Toni Gabaldón, Congress Organiser 2025
We are extremely grateful to all of them for helping ESEB move forward, but particular thanks must be given to Tracey for her service as President.
We are grateful to the following for taking on new roles:
Sara Magalhães, President-elect 2025 – 2027 Deepa Agashe, Vice-President 2025 – 2027 Jonna Kulmuni, Secretary 2025 – 2029
Once more, we are extremely appreciative to everyone for taking on these roles and supporting your society.
Alongside the congress we have continued to promote ESEB’s activities and aims. A special mention should be made to the Special Topics Networks which are now such a strong and popular feature of the ESEB proceedings, and producing a series of great special issues, reviews and other articles for our journals.
One feature we have noted in discussion with members is a little confusion about the roles of the journals. The Journal of Evolutionary Biology (JEB) is our flagship journal and its success is critical to the successful running of the society. While there are a variety of opinions about the contemporary publishing landscape, the hybrid format of JEB (Open Access and subscription) currently generates the vast majority of our income, without which we could not operate in the way we do. The equivalent journal for our partner society, SSE is, of course, Evolution. Together with SSE we launched Evolution Letters in 2017 as a joint Open Access journal to highlight the best evolutionary research papers. We believe that Jon Slate initially and now Judith Mank have successfully established this as a premier journal in our area.
As stated frequently at the Congress and elsewhere we again emphasise that supporting society journals helps ensure the long-term success of the society.
2026 is an unusual summer in that we are not running either an ESEB or joint congress, though we are sure that there will be many other venues offering opportunities for presentations and networking. Of course, in 2027 we will run our first ever ‘Hub’ meeting. As a reminder, this will be a dispersed congress, with the 4 hubs located in Munich (lead, Aurelien Tellier), London (Max Reuter), Gothenburg (Kerstin Johannesson) and Istanbul (Mehmet Somel). Aurelien is leading the overall organization, with assistance from the other hub leads and Kees van Oers (ESEB Exec VP). The idea is that we would recommend that members avoid flights when travelling to their nearest Hub to attend the congress, to reduce environmental impact. Work continues apace to set out the arrangements and technical details for running a joint programme across the venues. The 2027 congress promises to be an innovative experiment in sustainable congress organising, and we are proud to be leading on this. We will carefully evaluate the outcome of the 2027 congress before deciding whether to adopt such meetings into our regular schedule.
2029 is now confirmed to be a joint congress with SSE, ASN & SSB and we are delighted that Ellen Decaestecker and colleagues at the KU Leuven and Ghent University will organise this.
All participants at these upcoming congresses should abide by the ESEB Code of Conduct and ESEB Code of Ethics, to ensure safety and inclusion for our members in ESEB-facing activities.
Please enjoy reading the information contained in the Newsletter. We believe that academic societies are extremely important, perhaps never more so. We encourage everyone to support ESEB and invite your students, friends and collaborators to join. Of around 1,500 attendees at the Barcelona congress who responded to the survey, around 500 were ESEB members and almost as many were not a member of any academic society. We look forward to having more ESEB members, who can also then benefit from the award schemes, Special Topic Networks and other networking opportunities provided by ESEB.
The Executive Committee Mike Ritchie, Jonna Kulmuni, and Kees van Oers |