[REVISED] SLiM Workshop "European Tour" in 2024: FOUR workshops!

[Ben Haller]

[This revised post has a couple of corrections and clarifications: adding the host institutions for the workshops, and correcting a couple of names and email addresses.]

Hi folks!

I'm excited to announce that there will be FOUR SLiM workshops in Europe in the spring of 2024 (NEXT YEAR!): I'm calling it the SLiM Workshop "European Tour".  :->  (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 and places and hosts will be:

• April 29 - May 3, 2024: Stockholm, Sweden, hosted by David Díez del Molino (diez....@gmail.com).  The host institution is the Centre for Palaeogenomics.

• May 13 - 17, 2024: Copenhagen, Denmark, hosted by Bárbara Parreira (slim....@gmail.com) and Hernán Morales (her...@sund.ku.dk).  The host institution is The Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen (the whole university has priority registration, as described below).

• May 27 - 31, 2024: Ancona, Italy, hosted by Francesco Giannelli (france...@gmail.com) and Emiliano Trucchi (emi.t...@gmail.com).  The host institutions are Marche Polytechnic Univeristy in Ancona (where the workshop will be held) and the University of Ferrara (both have priority registration).

• June 10 - 14, 2024: Edinburgh, Scotland, hosted by Susan Johnston (Susan.J...@ed.ac.uk) and Gregor Gorjanc (Gregor....@roslin.ed.ac.uk).  The host institution is the University of Edinburgh.

(I'm just gonna call Scotland part of Europe – they're honorary members, since every single council in Scotland voted Remain. :->)

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 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 – a lot of demand built up during the COVID years! – 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, people from the host institution(s) will have registration priority for the next two weeks (until the end of May 10th), and other applicants will be put on standby.  After that two-week period, the workshops will all revert to first-come-first-served, and people will be admitted in the order in which they applied.  (Please DO NOT make travel arrangements until you have been formally accepted to the workshop.)

To apply to one of these workshops, please send an email to the hosts (email addresses above) and myself (bha...@mac.com).  Please include the info below:

(1) your name, (2) your university or institutional affiliation including the name of the lab you are in, (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.

Note that there is also a workshop in Albuquerque this summer, which is full, and one at Harvard, August 28 - September 1, 2023, that is not full and is currently accepting applicants.  Please see the previous posts on this list for more information about those.

Please spead 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