SLiM Workshop in Iceland, 2026
Ben Haller
Hi folks!
I'm excited to announce that there will be a SLiM workshop in Iceland in 2026 (NEXT YEAR – a year and a half from now). Our hosts will be Áki Jarl Láruson, of the Marine & Freshwater Research Institute of Iceland, and Snæbjörn Pálsson, of the University of Iceland. I expect that there will be several other SLiM Workshops in Europe in 2026 also, but they will probably not be ready to announce for several months. (The goal of doing several workshops in a cluster is to minimize the carbon footprint per workshop by pooling my travel together, and by offering workshops that are closer to participants across Europe to decrease air miles.)
I am planning and announcing this Iceland workshop so early because of a rather special event: a total solar eclipse that will be visible from western Iceland, including Reykjavík, on August 12, 2026. You can read all about the eclipse here: https://eclipsophile.com/tse2026/. It may well be cloudy, but even if it is, a total eclipse under cloud cover is still an amazing experience!
The workshop will be held in Reykjavík or the vicinity over the following week, August 17-21, 2026 (NEXT YEAR – I’m trying to make sure nobody gets confused about this!). Some folks may want to arrive early enough to see the eclipse. Lodging in Iceland is already getting booked up because of the eclipse, and so it may be important to reserve your spot in the workshop and then book your lodging and such as soon as you can. This workshop is therefore OPEN FOR REGISTRATION NOW. It will be free, as always, and open to participants outside of the hosting institution. HOWEVER, registration is required, and a limited number of seats (~30) will be available. These dates are a long way out at this point, obviously, but I do expect this workshop to fill, so you might not want to wait too terribly long to register, if you can make plans that far in advance. (All four of the SLiM Workshops for Europe in 2025 have been filled for quite a while, and have very long waitlists now.) Note that half of the seats are first-come-first-served starting now, and the other half are reserved for priority registrations from people at the host institutions for one month after this announcement; after that period, those reserved seats will revert to first-come-first-served.
If you would really rather attend a workshop elsewhere in Europe, please do not apply to this workshop! Other Europe 2026 workshops should be announced in the coming months, and if you watch the slim-discuss list and apply immediately after they are announced, you will probably be able to get in. If you intend to switch to a different Europe 2026 workshop once they are announced, you would just be taking up a seat that someone else wants – and by the time you changed to the other workshop, that other person might no longer be able to find lodging and transportation for Iceland, because things will get booked up due to the eclipse. For this reason, I am taking an unusual step: IF YOU APPLY TO THIS WORKSHOP AND ARE ACCEPTED, I WILL NOT TAKE AN APPLICATION FROM YOU FOR ANY OTHER EUROPE 2026 WORKSHOP LATER ON. YOU WILL BE COMMITTED TO THIS WORKSHOP; I WILL NOT ALLOW TRANSFERS. Please understand this policy and choose accordingly.
To apply to this workshop, please fill out the application form at https://forms.gle/Dpqv7yUbLGgSBqqN7. Please read the form carefully. Note that there will be no automatic confirmation email after you submit the form; you will hear from me personally (bha...@mac.com) by email once I have handled your application, and that might take a week or more. I suggest that you whitelist my email address when you apply, so that you are sure to receive my emails; if I cannot communicate with you, your registration will be dropped (and yes, this has happened). Please do not make travel arrangements until you have been formally accepted to the workshop. Please do not apply to this workshop unless you are sufficiently serious that you will actually attend, if accepted.
There are no strict prerequisites for the workshop, but it is recommended that all attendees have at least a little experience programming; if you have no programming experience, it is recommended that you complete an introductory R course beforehand. (SLiM does not use R, but it is similar.) Further information for attendees can be found at http://benhaller.com/workshops/workshops_attendees.html. Note that you will be responsible for arranging your own food, lodging, and transportation.
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, nucleotide-based models, and multispecies 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 (most of the day Friday, probably), and we typically have a couple of guest lectures on SLiM-related topics.
The workshop will be taught principally using SLiMgui, SLiM's graphical modeling environment. SLiMgui is cross-platform on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Every attendee will need their own laptop with SLiM and SLiMgui installed (see the info for attendees page for more information on software and hardware requirements). Loaner laptops are sometimes available for workshops, for those who do not have one; you can request one on the application form, but we cannot guarantee at this time that one will be available.
Note that there may also be other workshops offered in other places, whether already announced or to be announced in the future. If you want to know about other SLiM workshops, please watch the slim-discuss or slim-announce mailing lists; workshop announcements are always posted there first. I also try to keep the information on the SLiM home page up to date, at https://messerlab.org/slim/#Workshops.
Please spread the word so more folks hear about this; feel free to share the link to this post on social media and such. Also, 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