Enabling data-driven discoveries in evolutionary genetics and genomics

The George W. Beadle Award honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers as a whole and led an exemplary research career. The 2025 awardee is Sudhir Kumar from Temple University, who has not only pushed the intellectual frontier of evolutionary genetics but has also served the community through numerous contributions to creating, disseminating, maintaining, and advancing invaluable software for molecular evolutionary genetics analyses (MEGA) and a web-accessible resource for species divergence times (TimeTree). In the essay below, Kumar traces the initiation and evolution of these resources and explains how these developments have driven his research program to develop computationally efficient and environmentally friendly innovations to address the growing need to analyze increasingly larger sequence data sets.