Workshop 4: Inference in Stochastic Models of Sequence Evolution
(February 22-26, 2010)
The past decade has witnessed the transition of computational biology, population genetics, and evolutionary biology, from relatively data-sparse and theory-driven subjects, into highly empirical and data-driven disciplines. The continuing data-explosion has meant that descriptive studies have tended to outpace more in-depth theory development and statistical modeling. Nevertheless, in the past decade our understanding of genome and population biology and evolution has increased dramatically, and combined with the availability of data, it seems that the time is ripe to reap the benefits of these developments, by giving a new impetus to statistical modeling and theory development in computational biology, broadly defined.
In this workshop, we aim to bring together leading experts on genome biology and evolution, with an interest in quantitative modeling. We hope to create an interesting mix of, on the one hand, researchers whose main focus is on biology or evolution, with researchers who are primarily interested in the modeling aspects of these biological problems, from a mathematical, statistical, or algorithmic perspective.
The program is organized around the following five interest areas:
- Viruses and pathogens
- Paleogenetics and reconstruction
- Genome and pathway evolution
- Human diversity and populations
- Comparative genomics
The workshop will feature about 20 short talks spread over 5 days, with plenty of time in between. In these slots it will be possible (and strongly encouraged) to organize informal breakout sessions in smaller groups, to discuss topical problems in more depth.
Accepted Speakers
- Ana Arribas Gil (Departamento de Estadistica, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)
- Steve Benner (Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Florida)
- Elhanan Borenstein (Stanford University of The Santa Fe Institute)
- Daniel Falush (Department of Microbiology, Environmental Research Institute)
- Cedric Feschotte (Department of Biology, The University of Texas at Arlington)
- Robin Gutell (Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, The University of Texas at Austin)
- Carolin Kosiol (Bioinformatics, Institut fur Populationsgenetik)
- Rasmus Nielsen (Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley)
- Katie Pollard (Gladstone Institutes, University of California, San Francisco)
- Tali Raveh-Sadka (Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science)
- Adam Siepel (Biological Statistics & Computational Biology, Cornell University)
- Marc Suchard (Department of Biomathematics and Human Genetics, UCLA School of Public Health)
Accepted Participants
- Chris Holmes (Department of Statistics, Oxford University)
- Ian Holmes (Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley)
- Gerton Lunter (Department of Physiology Anatomy & Genetics, University of Oxford)
- Abdoulaye Diallo (Computer Science Department, Universite du Quebec in Montreal)
- Paul Francois (Center for Studies in Physics and Biology, The Rockefeller University)
- Michael Lassig (Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne)
- David Liberles (Department of Molecular Biology, University of Wyoming)
- Thomas Mailund (Bioinformatics Research Center, Aarhus University)