The ESEB congress 2021 has been postponed to 2022, but the congress organisers and ESEB will host eight virtual satellites meetings between June and September 2021. Registration for these virtual symposia will open on 20 April 2021.

The list of all Satellite Symposia 2021 and information about registration and abstract submission is now available at the ESEB 2022 congress website:

https://www.eseb2021.cz/en/satellite-symposia-2021

The Equal Opportunities committee would like to draw your attention to the webinar “Safer Science: Strategies to protect at-risk researchers when conducting fieldwork”.

Date & Time: February 17, 2021, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm EST
Website for registration: https://cals.cornell.edu/saferscience

This webinar was developed and is being executed by two graduate students, Amelia-Juliette Demery and Monique Pipkin at Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University. They recently published a paper on the topic here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-01328-5

Please spread the word and encourage colleagues and students to register and to pose questions ahead of time that the moderators can use audience questions to engage the panel in relevant conversation.

The European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) is seeking to appoint a new Editor-in-Chief in 2021. For more details please see this advertisement: JEB Editor-in-Chief.
Deadline for applications: 30 November 2020.

Deadline will close on 31^st March 2021!

ESEB invites proposals for Special Topic Networks that will support dynamic and flexible series of small meetings or other networking opportunities in focused and currently active research areas.

Read more about the current Special Topic Networks and how to apply …

Black lives matter. After many years of fights and protests, how sad it is that we still have to be reminded of this simple fact. We are deeply moved by the horror of racist crimes, and we share the frustration and anger that they justly trigger. As evolutionary biologists and members of the European Society of Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), we wish to express solidarity with and support for victims of racism, in the US and all over the world.
While the history of racism has distinct features in the US, much of it has European roots, and we should not overlook the sad fact that European history itself is soaked with the blood of the victims of racism – and that so many of our citizens and immigrants to Europe endure ongoing hardship, prejudice, violence, and uphill battles to succeed and develop as human beings only because of their skin colour or origin.

Evolutionary biology has contributed in a complex way to debates about race, some of which have unfortunately been used to justify racist attitudes. None of the knowledge that we produce can justify discriminating between people according to their origin or skin colour. It seems to us that antiracism is fundamentally a moral standpoint, not a scientific perspective. The outrage that so many of us feel over ongoing racial violence and discrimination in our world may nevertheless prompt us, as members of ESEB, an international learned society that brings diverse people together, to ask what we can do to combat these blights.

How can we make our scientific community more diverse and welcoming? Despite its international profile, ESEB membership remains unrepresentative of human diversity, globally or in Europe. Since its inception in 1987, ESEB has seen a steady increase in the contribution made by women to evolutionary biology and to the life of the society. However, non-Caucasians are severely underrepresented in our research community and in ESEB. We clearly need to maintain efforts to be more inclusive in our reach and activities as a Society, to be alert to the potential influences of unconscious bias to which we are all prone, to adopt and act on policies that increase diversity in many dimensions, and to combat all forms of racism. The ESEB Equal Opportunity committee welcomes suggestions from our members on what more we can do.

ESEB Executive Committee: Ophélie Ronce (President), John Pannell (Secretary), Koen Verhoeven (Executive Vice-President), Wolf Blankenhorn (Editor in Chief, JEB), Mike Ritchie (Evolution Letters Officer)