Workshop at Harvard (Cambridge, MA), Aug. 28 - Sept. 1, 2023

[Ben Haller]

Hi all!

I'm pleased to announce a second SLiM Workshop this year (in addition to the Albuquerque one, which is now full): August 28 - September 1, 2023, at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.  It will be hosted by several Harvard folks: Daren Card, Tim Sackton, and Javier Maravall.  It will be free, and open to participants outside of the university.  HOWEVER, registration is required, and a limited number of seats are available.  Note that Harvard internal applicants will have registration priority until May 5th; other applicants will be on standby until May 6th, when it will become 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.)  Early application is advised; these workshops often fill to capacity.

Advance warning: this Tuesday, the 25th, I plan to announce several more SLiM Workshops, to be held in different locations in Europe in the spring of 2024.  So, if attending a workshop in Europe is easier/better for you than Harvard, you might hold off and watch this space for further announcements.

To apply to the Harvard workshop, please send an email to Daren, Javier, and myself (but not Tim).  Please use the addresses dc...@fas.harvard.edu, fmarava...@fas.harvard.edu, and bha...@mac.com, and 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.

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