The 1st of february 2017, Juliana Stival Sena, Ph.D. candidate in forest sciences at Université Laval and member of the Canada Research Chair in Forest Genomics, successfully presented her thesis entitled “Structural and functional evolution of genes in conifers”. Juliana’s work has shown that the evolution of gene structure is dynamic in conifers, and that a large number of gene duplications occurred in the dehydrine family over the tens of million years since the origin of the Pinaceae. In addition, she demonstrated that these genes are involved in adaptation to drought in many different ways. These results provide new avenues for future research that aims to decipher the genetic basis of development and adaptation to climatic variations in conifers, and to pinpoint the geographic distribution of genetic diversity in these genes. The evaluation committee consisted of Jean Bousquet, research director (Canada Research Chair in Forest Genomics, Université Laval), John Mackay, research co-director (Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford), Marie Teresa Cervera, external reviewer (Instituto Nacional de Investigacion y Tecnologia Agraria of Spain), Armand Séguin, external reviewer (Laurentian Forestry Center, Natural Resources Canada), and François Belzile, internal reviewer (Institut de Biologie Intégrative et des Systèmes, Université Laval). The defense was chaired by Nancy Gélinas, vice-dean of studies at the Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics. Congratulations Juliana!