Looking for a SLiM Workshop guest speaker

[Ben Haller]

Hi folks!  I'm posting with an unusual request.  I generally like to have two guest lectures on the last day of the SLiM Workshop (typically Friday, since the workshop usually runs for five days, Monday to Friday).  I'm hoping to find someone new who is interested in giving such lectures from time to time, as scheduling permits.  This would be unpaid, but of course for many of us in academia outreach like this is, or should be, part of our regular jobs (as it is for me in my teaching of the workshops).  For the 2025 workshop season, the date that I particularly need to fill is Friday 4 July, speaking to the workshop in Paimpont, France, at approximately 10 or 10:15 AM.

Because I often give workshops in Europe (like this one in Paimpont), it would probably be best to find someone in Europe, otherwise the time difference can be rather an obstacle (10 AM in France is 4 AM in New York at the moment, for example).  But if you're a night owl and would be happy to give a talk at 4 AM, then hey, that's fine too.  :->

Besides that, here are other things I'm looking for:

- You are not a flake, and can commit to a talk weeks or months in advance and then actually show up for it;

- You are experienced enough in SLiM that you'd be comfortable giving a 30 to 45 minute talk about published research you spearheaded that used SLiM in a central way, including presenting details of the model you used, the way you collected simulation output and analyzed it, etc.;

- Your use of SLiM goes beyond basic WF popgen modeling into areas that students at the end of the SLiM workshop will find interesting and challenging, such as (but not limited to): continuous-space modeling; tree-sequence recording with some kind of unusual analysis done in Python; multispecies modeling; eco-evolutionary dynamics; complex individual-level behavior; weird nonWF modeling like seed banks, sperm storage, etc.; epidemiological simulations; or empirically-based conservation and management simulations.

You can be any career stage at all; for professors, this can be a great opportunity to advertise what you do in your lab to a bunch of SLiM-savvy PhD students and postdocs, whereas for PhD students or even motivated undergrads, it can be a great way to make yourself known to more senior people who might want to hire you into a position down the road.  It's also a fun opportunity to give an unusual type of talk – you can really focus on the modeling methods, and talk for much longer than a typical conference talk, so you can delve into things that you probably never get to present otherwise, but that you're excited about and want to share.

If this sounds interesting to you, please contact me off-list at bha...@mac.com.  Send me a little bio, like a paragraph about yourself, where you work, your field, your position, how long you've been using SLiM, that kind of thing.  Describe in some detail – another short paragraph – what topic you think you'd like to talk about to the workshop, and include a DOI to a related paper if there is one.

I hope somebody out there finds this opportunity exciting!  The students in the workshop love the guest lectures; your talk would make an impression on many of them.  Thanks for reading!

Cheers,
-B.

Benjamin C. Haller
Messer Lab
Cornell University