SLiM Workshop at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), October 5-9, 2026

[Ben Haller]

Hi folks!

I'm excited to announce that there will be a SLiM workshop at Cornell in the fall of 2026:

Ithaca (New York, U.S.A.): October 5 – October 9, 2026

At Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y.  Hosted by John Benning (Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) and Erik Enbody (Dept. of Computational Biology).

This workshop is OPEN FOR REGISTRATION NOW.  It 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.  I expect this workshop to fill quickly, since it is the first workshop held in the U.S. since 2024, so you might want register promptly.  Note that 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 departments for one month (to the end of 1 July 2026) and will then revert to first-come-first-served.

To apply to these workshops, please fill out the application form at https://forms.gle/6LbcnCsS19DJHnig9.  Please read the form 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.  Please do not apply on behalf of someone else; only apply if you yourself will attend.

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 as they are announced, please watch the slim-discuss or slim-announce mailing lists; workshop announcements are always posted there first.  Currently announced workshops can be viewed at https://messerlab.org/slim/#Workshops.

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