On Monday, May 22 at 12:30h in the assembly hall of the main building of the Science Park, the annual conference in memory of Mario Fares is held. This is a joint initiative of the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio and the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology that gives a voice to distinguished young researchers in evolutionary biology. This year the conference will be given by Aida Andrés (University College London) and is titled “Host immunity adaptation to SIV across chimpanzee populations”.

In chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, the central and eastern subspecies are naturally infected in the wild by the simian immunodeficiency lentivirus (SIV). Although SIV infection reduces physical fitness, it is not usually associated with the immunodeficiency that characterizes AIDS in humans – caused by the zoonotic transmission of SIV in chimpanzees that gave rise to HIV and one of the deadliest pandemics in history. Aida Andrés' research confirms the importance of SIV as a selective force, sheds light on host strategies to reduce SIV pathogenicity, and demonstrates the potential of population genomics to understand these processes.

Aida Andrés is a senior lecturer at University College London (UCL). Aida obtained her PhD working on comparative primate genomics at the Pompeu Fabra University under the supervision of Jaume Bertranpetit. He then completed two postdocs in human population genomics, first at Cornell University, in Andrew G. Clark's group, and then at the National Human Genome Research Institute (MD, USA), with Eric Green. He moved to Leipzig (Germany) to launch a new group on population genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, before joining the UCL Institute of Genetics in 2017.

The annual conference in memory of Mario Ali Fares is a joint initiative of the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology I2SysBio (a joint center of the Universitat de València and the CSIC) and the Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology. Mario Ali Fares was a researcher at the CSIC and Trinity College Dublin, founding member of I2SysBio.