Frontier Talk

Joe Hanly On The Frontier: Evolutionary Genomics

Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 5:00–6:00 PM. Room TBA, Foggy Bottom campus.

Welcome to Frontier Talks! We have Joe Hanly on where evolutionary genomics is headed, and how AI is changing his work.

Speaker

Joe Hanly, Evolutionary Genomics

Joe Hanly is an evolutionary geneticist who studies how butterflies get their wing patterns and colors. After a PhD at the University of Cambridge on wing pattern diversity in Heliconius butterflies, he joined Arnaud Martin's butterfly evo-devo lab at GW as a postdoc, working with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

How Frontier Talks work

Riley informally interviews speakers, and we invite audience members to ask their own questions as we go. These are given in a casual setting, and speakers are invited to share some visuals without dressing it up as much as a fancy talk. These are intended for a smart, curious general audience and shouldn't require domain expertise to follow along.

Every speaker gets the same questions:

1. What's the broadest field you'd be comfortable calling yourself an expert in?
2. Why does your field exist?
3. What is your field responsible for delivering to the world?
4. What do you love about it?
5. What would it mean for your field to be solved?
6. How did your field get to where it is now?
7. Why isn't it solved yet? What are the bottlenecks?
8. How is AI changing it? What would still block you after AGI?
9. How do you feel about it, honestly?
10. What are you building or working on now?