On June 6th, the UC Santa Cruz Postdocs Association (USPA) held their annual symposium at the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. The event showcased the breadth of work being carried out by postdocs and graduate students across the university spanning physics, chemistry, and biology. In addition to a number of talks from UCSC postdocs, three invited speakers presented at this year’s symposium, covering a number of different fields including entrepreneurship, cosmology, and evolution.

Rishi gave a short presentation titled “Evolutionary dynamics of a complex supergene in the African monarch butterfly”. This talk started by outlining the key differences between using variation in nucleotides (e.g. A or T) to study evolutionary patterns compared to structural variation (including inversions, deletions, and duplications). He then outlined his work in the African monarch (Danaus chrysippus) system showing how long-read sequencing allows us to study complex structural variants to better understand how structural variation arises and is maintained through time.