Ioanna's research develops models to study the factors shaping adaptation and the evolutionary history of species, combining multi-species and multi-population data to model the evolution of protein-coding sequences. Ioanna Kotari (@popgenviennaphd.bsky.social) @janekay27.bsky.social

My awesome grad student Shashank and I wrote this paper trying to look at broader patterns of HT in TEs. HT is happening everywhere! DNA transposons jump further than other classes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are excited to welcome our three new SMBE Fellows! Ioanna Kotari, Shady Kuster, and Haoran Cai will join @molbioevol.bsky.social and @genomebiolevol.bsky.social as writing fellows. Keep an eye on our next Highlight articles in MBE and GBE! #society #scicomm #evobio #molbio #genome #evolution

Take a look at my first preprint as a first author! We analyse the effect of population structure in SMC methods and find two systematic biases that have indeed extra information about the population! We model the nature of these biases and find a link with the isolation of the population and Fst.

We discovered an endogenous retrovirus that's still spreading in natural D. melanogaster populations! It was horizontally transferred from D. erecta in Central Africa, so we named it "Kuruka", which means "jump" in Swahili. Read its cool story here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This morning ended with the Graduate Student Excellence Symposium, where our eight awardees presented their great work. 👏 Congratulations to all GSEA recipients! #SMBE2025

Call for #PhD students open! Apply by 14 May to start your research career in #evolution #genetics in beautiful #Vienna among a fun international and interdisciplinary crowd of peers #evolVienna #bioinformatics #bigdata #Drosophila #adaptation #popgen