Dear colleagues,
We are happy to announce our summer school “Taming the BEAST” and would kindly ask you to forward this email to interested students and PostDocs. We apologize if you receive this email more than once.
Phylogenetics and phylodynamics are central topics in modern biology. Phylogenetic inferences reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between organisms, whereas phylodynamic inferences reveal the dynamics that lead to the observed relationships. These two fields have many practical applications in disciplines such as epidemiology, developmental biology, paleontology, ecology and even linguistics. However, phylogenetics and phylodynamics are complex and fast-evolving fields. As such, inference tools are not easily accessible to researchers who are not from a computational background.
Taming the BEAST is a summer school focusing on the BEAST2 software and consisting of a mix of invited talks, lectures and hands-on tutorials by leading and renowned experts in the field (including several of the core developers of BEAST2). The aim of this summer school is to equip participants with the skills necessary to confidently perform their own phylogenetic and phylodynamic inferences in Bayesian settings, while providing them with a firm grasp of the theory behind those inferences. Participants are also highly encouraged to bring their own datasets along and to engage with the organizers and speakers to address any problems specific to their own datasets/analyses.
Registration is now open! We welcome applications from graduate students and early-career scientists in the life sciences. Preference will be given to applicants who are not from a computational background and applicants who have already collected/assembled a dataset that they need to analyze.
Invited speakers: Tanja Stadler (ETH Zurich) Alexei Drummond (University of Auckland) Tracy Heath (Iowa State University) Tim Vaughan (University of Auckland) Oliver Pybus (University of Oxford)
Dates: June 26th to July 1st (Registration deadline: March 15th).
Place: Engelberg, Switzerland
Registration Fee: 650 CHF for students and postdocs, 1000 CHF for industry. (Registration fee includes accommodation and meals).
For more information regarding the program, registration, venue, etc, please visit the summer school website: https://www.bsse.ethz.ch/cevo/taming-the-beast.html
We hope to see you there,
the Taming the BEAST organizing team