Invited speakers list

Session 1. Lessons from non-metazoan relatives

• Thibaut Brunet (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, USA)
  Reconstructing the cellular phenotype of the single-celled ancestor of animals
• Susana Coelho (Max Planck Institute, Tübingen, Germany)
  Origin and evolution of the sexes: lessons from non-metazoans cousins
• László Nagy (Biological Research Centre, Szeged, Hungary)
  Taxonomic vs genomic fungi: large turnover of protistan genetic heritage in the fungal kingdom.
• Jill Harrison (University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom)
  The origin and rise of vascular plants
   

Session 2. Lessons from the fossil record

• Abder El Albani (University of Poitiers, France)
  Life history: A new perspective in the understanding of the emergence of multicellularity
• Jean Vannier (University of Lyon 1, France)
  Understanding animal radiation in the Cambrian: Why fossils are so important
• Phil Donoghue (University of Bristol, United Kingdom)
  Developmental biology of early animals and their near relatives
   

Session 3. Animal evolutionary relationships and tree topology

• Hervé Philippe (CBTM, Moulis, France)
  Phylogénie des eucaryotes
• Gert Wörheide (LMU, Munich, Germany)
  Towards resolving controversial nodes in the animal tree of life
• Casey Dunn (Yale University, New Haven, USA)
  Phylogenetic comparative analyses of functional genomics
• Camille Berthelot (IBENS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France)
  Combining synteny and sequence-based approaches to investigate genome evolution
   

Session 4. Lessons from Placozoans

• Harald Gruber-Vodicka (MPI, Bremen, Germany)
  Symbiosis as a driver of metazoan evolution
• Tatiana Mayorova (NIH, Bethesda, USA)
  Placozoan cell types - counterparts of cell types in other animal phyla?
   

Session 5. Evolution of cells and cell types

• Arnau Sebé Pedros (CRG, Barcelona, Spain)
  Single-cell analysis of early metazoan cell type programs
• Juliette Azimzadeh (Institut Jacques Monod, Paris, France)
  Evolutionary perspective on centriole polarisation in multiciliated cells
• Detlev Arendt (EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany)
  The assembly of molecular machinery in metazoan cell type evolution
• Kristin Tessmar-Raible (University of Vienna, Austria)
  Telling time by sun and moon: What marine worms and midges can tell about the evolution of the mechanisms
   

Session 6. Lessons from Sponges and Ctenophores

• Emmanuelle Renard (IMBE, Marseille, France)
  Insights into the first glass sponge genome
• Sally Leys (Univeristy of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
  Sponge lives matter: physiology of sponges in the genomic era
• Bernie Degnan (Universty of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia)
  Origin of animal multicellularity and complex differentiation landscapes
• Ana Riesgo (Natural History Museum,  London, United Kingdom)
  Bacteria and sex: The role of the microbiome in the sexual determination and strategy shifts of sponges
• Joe Ryan (Whitney Laboratory, University of Florida, USA)
  Evidence for muscle cell types in the last common animal ancestor
• André Le Bivic (IBDM, Marseille, France)
  Evolution of adherens junctions in epithelial cells of metazoans
   

Session 7. Lessons from Cnidarians

• Richard Copley (LBDV, Villefranche-sur-mer, France)
  Genes of the cnidarian-bilaterian ancestor
• Celina Juliano (University of Davis, California, USA)
  Mechanisms of Development and Regeneration in Hydra
• Matt Gibson (Stowers Institute, Kansas, USA)
  Tracing the origins of segmentation and segment polarization in animals
• Ulrich Technau (University of Vienna, Austria)
  Assessing Genomic and cellular features of complexity in the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis