By Jigar Trivedi, PhD Candidate at McGill University

Thanks to the conference award granted by QCBS, I got the opportunity to attend and present my work at the annual Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) conference held in Beijing, China, from July 20 to 24, 2025.

I was initially anxious to attend due to my negligible proficiency in Mandarin and the media coverage about China. But my experience was nothing short of spectacular and uplifting. During these four days, I was surrounded by evolutionary biologists who think in genomes, mutations and models to address relevant questions in evolutionary biology.

On the first day, big questions filled the room about how molecular changes translate into evolutionary patterns and how major theories are tested using ever-increasing big data. I started my days with sheer excitement, only to feel like an imposter after following the work of brilliant academics around the world. One of the absolute highlights was the keynote by Dr. Dmitri Petrov from Stanford University, California. It was the kind of talk that made me rethink the “neutral” assumptions in my own sequence data.

The middle days were intense with parallel sessions, topics ranging from beyond the genome, ancient DNA, AI-integration for evolutionary models. Most meaningful moments happened outside the halls, as I presented my poster on the evolutionary maintenance of the mitochondrial genomes of Daphnia pulex. My work highlights that even under a stringent bottlenecking and minimizing selection in Daphnia for around a decade, their mitochondrial genome did not accumulate harmful mutations and loose function. My findings directly counters the argument of Muller’s Ratchet – i.e. mutational meltdown of mitochondrial genomes. I also got a chance to have conversations with notable names like Dr. Michael Lynch and Dr. Dmitri Petrov.

By the final day, I had a clearer sense of what kind of questions I want to keep asking myself in future research projects. 

After the conference, I climbed the Great Wall of China during a very hot and humid day (as per Canadian standards). The wall felt like a physical metaphor for everything I had been thinking about all week—incremental effort, accumulation, endurance.

I came back from SMBE 2025 not energized, but steadied. I was reminded that progress—scientific or personal—is rarely dramatic. More often, it’s slow, cumulative and is gradual, just like the process of Evolution.

For any other grad students considering attending an international conference on the other side of the world in the future: Don’t hesitate, apply for the QCBS award, sleep on the plane, and get your poster/talk ready. The perspective you gain is worth every mile.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish my manuscript.

About the author:

Jigar Trivedi is a PhD Candidate at McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Melania Cristescu. His research focuses on the mutation accumulation in the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes using Daphnia pulex.

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jigar-trivedi
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jigar06.bsky.social