Hi folks!
I'm excited to announce that there will be FOUR SLiM workshops in Europe in the summer of 2025 (NEXT YEAR!). (The goal 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.)
The dates, places, and hosts will be:
Paimpont (France): June 30 – July 4, 2025
In Brittany, west of Rennes, at a biological station in the Brocéliande Forest. Somewhat remote and isolated. All meals will be served on-site (breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 34€ per person/day; dietary restrictions can be accommodated). Rustic accommodations will be (optionally) provided on-site (single/twin room for 35/45€ per night/person). Hosted by Claire Mérot and Sylvain Glémin (Université de Rennes), within the framework of the GDR Interdisciplinary Approach to Molecular Evolution.
Lausanne (Switzerland): July 14 – July 18, 2025
At the Université de Lausanne (UNIL), 5 km west of the town center. Lunches will be at the university cafeteria, max cost ~15 CHF. Hosted by Jérôme Goudet, Vitor Sudbrack and Diego Hartasanchez Frenk.
Vienna (Austria): July 28 – August 1, 2025
At the Universität Wien, Department of Mathematics, in north-central Vienna. Hosted by Ben Wölfl and Joachim Hermisson.
Helsinki (Finland): August 11 – August 15, 2025
At the Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE), at their main (Viiki) campus 10 km northeast of downtown Helsinki. Hosted by Jan-Peter George (LUKE) and Tanja Pyhäjärvi (University of Helsinki).
These workshops are ALL OPEN FOR REGISTRATION NOW. They will be free, and open to participants outside of the hosting institution. HOWEVER, registration is required, and a limited number of seats (~30) are available in each. These dates are a long way out at this point, obviously! I do expect some or all of these workshops to fill, though, so you might not want to wait too terribly long to register, if you can make plans that far in advance. Note that in all cases, 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 institution(s) for one month (to the end of 6 October) and will then revert to first-come-first-served.
To apply to these workshops, please fill out the application form at https://forms.gle/UEYp89VeFTv79bTZ9. There is one joint application form for all four workshops, and you will be able to indicate first/second choice, etc., if you wish. Please read it 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. 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 a 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, except as may be noted above for particular workshops.
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, typically), 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; 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.
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