Genealogy of Life

Comprehensive understanding of life and how and why it changes over time depends on knowledge of the phylogeny (evolutionary relationships) of living and extinct organisms. The goals of the Genealogy of Life (GoLife) program are to resolve the phylogenetic history of all life’s diverse forms and to integrate this genealogical architecture with underlying organismal and environmental data.

The ultimate vision of this program is an open access, comprehensive Genealogy of Life that will enable the comparative framework necessary for testing questions in systematics, evolutionary biology, ecology, paleontology, and other fields. Strategic integration of this genealogy of life with data layers from genomic, phenotypic, spatial, ecological, geological, and temporal data will produce an extensive synthesis of biodiversity and evolutionary sciences. The resulting knowledge infrastructure will enable synthetic research on biological dynamics throughout the history of life on Earth, within current ecosystems, and for predictive modeling of the future evolution of life.

Projects submitted to this program should emphasize increased efficiency in contributing to a complete Genealogy of Life and strategic integration of various types of organismal and environmental data with phylogenies.

This program also seeks to broadly train the next generation of integrative phylogenetic biologists, creating the human resource infrastructure and workforce needed to tackle emerging research questions in comparative biology. Projects should train students for diverse careers by exposing them to the multidisciplinary areas of research within the proposal.