Workshop at the University of Iceland (Reykjavík), March 6-10, 2020

[Ben Haller]

Hi all.  I'm posting this workshop a second time, since there are still a couple of spaces free.  THIS IS THE ONLY WORKSHOP I AM LIKELY TO RUN IN EUROPE UNTIL MID-2021.

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March 6-10, 2020, a five-day SLiM workshop will be offered at the University of Iceland (Reykjavík, Iceland).  It will be hosted by Snæbjörn Pálsson and Arnar Pálsson, of the University of Iceland (Háskóli íslands).  It will be free, and open to participants outside of the university.  HOWEVER, registration is required, and a limited number of seats are available.  To apply, please send an email to BOTH Snæbjörn and myself (sna...@hi.is, bha...@mac.com) with the info below.  Admission is now first-come-first-served so that we can notify everyone of their acceptance in time to make travel arrangements.

As background: SLiM is a software package for creating evolutionary models/simulations that are individual-based and genetically explicit.  It is scriptable, flexible, fast, and includes an interactive graphical modeling environment.  You can read more about it on its home page (https://messerlab.org/slim/).

The dates for it have been chosen to dovetail with the Oikos conference in Reykjavík, which is March 3-5 (https://www.oikos2020.org); we hope that this will make the workshop more convenient for many to attend, but the two events are not affiliated (in other words, attendance at Oikos is not required to attend the workshop).

For this workshop, your application email should include: (1) your name, (2) your university or institutional affiliation, (3) a link to a research website or similar academic page, if you have one, (4) a 1-2 sentence description of your level of experience with SLiM and any other forward genetic simulation software, if any, (5) a 1-2 sentence summary of why you want to attend the workshop (i.e., the connection to your research), and (6) 1-2 sentences about any specific topics within SLiM that you hope to learn about in the workshop.  Note that you will be responsible for your own lodging and your own transportation.  Please do not apply to the workshop unless you are sufficiently serious that you will actually attend, if accepted.

The plan is to cover all the major topics in the SLiM manual, starting with lots of introductory material to get beginners up to speed with SLiM and its associated scripting language Eidos, and ending up at advanced topics like non-Wright-Fisher models, tree-sequence recording, continuous-space models, and nucleotide-based models.  We won't cover everything in the manual – that would be overwhelming! – but we'll try to cover all the big topics.  There will also be time for attendees to work on their own models with help from me, and we may also have time to explore some optional side topics that are of particular interest to those attending each workshop.  The workshop will be taught principally using SLiMgui on macOS.  Every attendee will need their own Mac laptop, but running macOS inside VirtualBox on another operating system is also possible.  (A Mac is required to run SLiMgui, which is necessary for teaching purposes.)

I'm hoping to continue doing workshops in future; if you would like to invite me to give a workshop at your institution, please send me an email (off-list).

Cheers,

Benjamin C. Haller

Messer Lab

Cornell University