Workshop at UNM in Albuquerque, NM, June 16-20, 2023

[Ben Haller]

Hi all!

I'm pleased to announce our first in-person SLiM Workshop since the beginning of the COVID pandemic: June 16-20, 2023, at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  (Note that New Mexico is a state in the U.S., not in Mexico, for those unfamiliar with U.S. geography!).  It will be hosted by Davorka Gulisija of UNM.  It will be free, and open to participants outside of the university.  HOWEVER, registration is required, a limited number of seats are available, and some seats will be reserved for registrants affiliated with UNM.  To apply, please send an email to BOTH Davorka and myself (dgul...@unm.edu, bha...@mac.com) with the info below.  Priority for UNM applicants will end on 27 March; after that date it will be first-come-first-served for all remaining seats so that we can notify everyone of their acceptance in time to make travel arrangements.  (Please DO NOT make travel arrangements until you have been formally accepted to the workshop.)  Early application is advised; these workshops often fill to capacity.

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/).

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), (6) 1-2 sentences about any specific topics within SLiM that you hope to learn about in the workshop, and (7) A sentence stating that you are up-to-date on your COVID vaccinations, including all booster shots recommended by the U.S. CDC.  Note that you may be required to provide proof of vaccination prior to attending.  Further information for attendees, including details on our COVID policy, can be found at http://benhaller.com/workshops/workshops_attendees.html.  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, 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, 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, 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; please let us know if you will need one.

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