Thanks for a fun and productive workshop

 

The ASHG update

We have to start this post with a big  ALOHA!

Most of the participants of the workshop have already arrived to Honolulu and we have a line-up of an excellent series of talks.  In addition, we are also encourage by the talks and posters in the American Society of Human Genetics meetings, which  highlight the enormous pace in which the  genotyping and discovery technologies are developing and, may be more importantly, emphasize the regained importance “population specific rare variants” in understanding human genetic variation and its relation to human evolution and disease.  So, we feel even more strongly about some of the basic premises of the “Genetic Anthropology at fine-scales workshop and  we are looking forward to meeting with all of you.

Omer and Krishna

June Update

Dear All,

Summer is upon us!  It has been a very productive couple of months and we have have handled most of the logistic issues.

We started receiving some ideas from some of you about the topics that you want to discuss during the workshop.  The plan is to put together a summary highlighting the common questions about genetic anthropology, sampling issues, quantitative challenges, etc.  So, whenever you have some time, It would be great to hear a very short statement/bullet-points about your ideas regarding “Genetic Anthropology at fine-scales”.

On another note, at this point we need to start rounding up our budget for this workshop.  Hence, we would like precise amounts of funds required from us for your travels and accommodation.  We have already talked with some of you and for those who required no financial assistance do not need to reply to this thread.  It would be very helpful if people, who require funding from us, send us the an near exact estimate of what is needed so that we can budget accordingly.

Last issue is the website.  We have moved our webpage to “wordpress”, which is a much easier tool to edit.  You can reach the website from http://geneticanthropology.wordpress.com/.

Please let us know if you have any questions,

All the best,

Omer & Krishna

Welcome e-mail

Dear All,

This is the first group e-mail to signify the beginning of the Genetic Anthropology at Fine Scales workshop. First of all, thank you for agreeing to take part. We have managed to assemble quite a group and we anticipate that some very exciting work (and hopefully long lasting collaborations) will be generated during the next couple of months. Hopefully you have all received you official invitation letters plus roundtable assignments and some basic practical details. If not please inform us and we will send them to you.

Obviously the actual workshop is some 5 months away, but to make sure that it will be as productive as possible we have decided to get the ball rolling now. We have grouped you all into particular subject areas (roundtables), with one chair and 3 presenters per roundtable. As this point we have already had interest to incorporate the workshop’s findings in peer-reviewed journals. We expect the workshop to generate a comprehensive review paper in a a top journal (maybe Nature Genetics, American Journal of Human Genetics). However some journals (e.g. Human Biology), have expressed an interest in having a series of papers (perhaps one per roundtable topic). Therefore, if the group proves to be dynamic and enthusiastic enough we believe there is the potential to submit a number of publications as a result of the workshop. At this point however we have chosen not to definitively say what will come out of the workshop, instead we shall just see how the group interacts to get a realistic feel of what can and cannot be done.

Also, to get you thinking about the themes of the workshop and get everyone more familiar with each others ideas can we ask you to prepare a half page/one page (though feel free to make it longer if you want) summary of your current views on your assigned subject area. These summaries will then be compiled into one document and sent out to participants of the workshop (they will not be sent to anyone else). These summaries can be very loose (references are not needed, a series of bullet points would be fine etc), speculative and just identify key points. Also, if it helps you be more expressive please let us know if you would like your summary to be anonymous, we are quite happy for you to do this.  You can think of these summaries as stimuli for the real discussion in October. If we could ask you to submit these pages by the 15th July to one of us (Omer or Krishna) that would be extremely helpful. We understand you are all very busy and so this is somewhat of a inconvenience given that we will already impinge on your time in October but we believe this process will be invaluable for making the workshop as productive as possible.

Finally, we will shortly be in touch with all of you personally to discuss travel and accommodation. In the meantime if you need anything please do not hesitate to let us know. Thank you once again for being part of the workshop and see you all in Hawaii.

Welcome!

This website is intended for coordinating the organization of the “Genetic Anthropology at fine scales” workshop, and later, for dissemination of the results of this event.