Training in Innovative Phylogenetics and Comparative Methods at the Society of Systematic Biologists Meeting, January, 2017, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge LA

Investigators

Abstract

This workshop will provide a much-needed training opportunity for graduate students and early-career researchers in the latest cutting edge approaches for analyzing big data in evolutionary biology. Workshop participants will be recruited from diverse levels of expertise with a specific effort to target underrepresented minorities. Participants will be trained in the theory behind, and the application of these tools. Sessions will be taught by expert faculty, who developed these computational tools. Long-term access to workshop materials, such as slides, tutorials, source codes, and exemplar datasets will be made available to the research community and the public via GitHub. Phylogenetic and comparative methods are advancing at a rapid pace, and individual researchers often find it difficult to keep abreast of the latest developments. This workshop will offer the following training sessions: a) understanding comparative methods (featuring the bayou R library and the Arbor platform), b) training in biogeography (featuring BioGeoBears, and RevBayes), c) model selection in phylogeography (via Phrapl), d) visualization and exploration of tree sets using TreeScaper, and e) phylogenetic libraries (via Dendropy).