Speaker
Tom Williams is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Associate Professor in Molecular Evolution at the University of Bristol, UK. He obtained an undergraduate degree in Genetics and a PhD in bioinformatics from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, the latter under the supervision of Mario Fares. From 2010-2015, he worked as a postdoc with Martin Embley at Newcastle University, UK, on phylogenetic methods and the origin of eukaryotic cells. He started a research group at the University of Bristol in 2015.
His work focuses on studying the early evolution of life using phylogenetic and comparative genomic methods (that is, with bioinformatics, on a computer). The key questions relate to the nature of early life, the phylogeny of prokaryotes, the processes of microbial/genome evolution, and the origin of eukaryotic cells.
Abstract
Some of the most fundamental unanswered questions in biology relate to the earliest stages of life’s evolution: the origin of proteins, genomes and cells, and the deep structure of the tree of life. With the advent of environmental genome sequencing, the modern diversity of life can be sampled more broadly and deeply than ever before. These data provide a rich new source of information with which to answer classic questions about the history of life, the nature of early cells, and the patterns and processes of evolution in deep time.
Progress also depends on the development of computational methods for inferring evolutionary trees, mapping gene origins, and reconstructing ancestral states that capture the complexity of genome data, and that can scale to make the most of the enormous quantities of data now available. In this talk, new work on phylogenomic methods and their application to the deepest branches of the tree of life, the nature of the last bacterial common ancestor, and the timescale for the diversification of bacterial and our own eukaryotic cells will be presented. Some of the biggest and most exciting questions about early life raised by this and other recent work will also be explored.
About Skerman Lecture
The Skerman Lecture recognises the contribution of Professor Victor Bruce Darlington Skerman in the development of Microbiology at The University of Queensland.
Professor Skerman was Head of the Department of Microbiology from 1962 to 1981, having been appointed Foundation Chair of Microbiology in 1961.
He had broad interests in microbial physiology, ecology and diversity, but is best known and recognised for his international reform of bacterial systematics and nomenclature.
The lecture was not offered in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read more about Professor Skerman on our history page.