Main Page

From academy

The NESCent Academy is a set of hands-on training workshops in evolutionary biology for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, early-career faculty and teachers. Our post-graduate courses are the result of a new, community-driven process for developing and offering short post-graduate courses in synthetic evolutionary science. We asked you, the evolutionary biology community, to suggest course ideas, vote on your ideas and submit full proposals. Each course will be 1-2 weeks long, be limited to approximately 25 students and include lectures balanced by hands-on activities.

2012 Post-graduate courses

Next-generation sequencing in evolutionary biology: This course will provide computational training required for those working with Next-generation sequencing data and is aimed in particular at graduate students, research fellows and faculty crossing the field into genomics. The course will cover manipulation of next-gen sequencing data, analysis of metagenomic data, phylogeny reconstruction from NGS and RNA quantification. We will use tools such as QIIME, RNA-Seq, Amazon EC2, Galaxy, Geneious, LOX and PhyDesign. More details and link to application.

Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics: Quantitative genetics deals with the inheritance of measurements of traits that are affected by many genes. Developments in the field are not reflected in textbooks and available courses aimed at evolutionary biologists. This workshop will review the basics of theory in the field of evolutionary quantitative genetics, its connections to evolution that is observed at various time scales and illustrate how that theory can be tested with data. Participants will learn to use R, an open-source statistical programming language, to build and test evolutionary models. More details and link to application.

Anatomy Ontologies in evolutionary biology and genetics: Anatomy ontologies and vocabularies play a crucial role in relating gene expression and phenotype data across taxa. This course aims to teach ontology design principles and practices to promote anatomical interoperability across evolutionarily disparate taxa. The course covers a basic introduction to ontology design principles and usage, specific ontology considerations for anatomy, application of anatomy ontologies in the context of evolutionary phenotype comparison, and use of anatomy ontologies for image annotation in different taxa. More details and link to application.

Computational Phyloinformatics: This course provides computational training for those wanting to script large-scale phylogenetic pipelines, post-tree analysis, and approaches for handling very large trees or large collections of trees. It is aimed at graduate students, postdocs, and faculty in phylogenetics with an interest in learning scripting languages such as Perl, Ruby, and SQL. For 2012, the course will be held at Moscow State University of the Russian Federation in conjunction with MolPhy-3, the 3rd international conference on molecular phylogenetics. More details and link to application

We will post announcements to the NESCent Twitter feed and the evoldir mailing list (among other venues).

2011 Post-graduate courses

We sponsored five post-graduate courses in summer 2011. Click on any course title to see detailed information from last year's courses.

Evolutionary quantitative genetics at NESCent
Next-gen sequencing at NESCent
Practical computing for biologists at North Carolina State University
Computational phyloinformatics at the Bioinformatics Center in Kyoto, Japan
Evolution and Medicine at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory

Workshops for Educators

In addition to our post-graduate courses, the NESCent Academy offers evolution workshops for teachers. Our 2011 workshop is in Madison, Wisconsin in August.

Here are links to programs from previous years:

Proposing a course

Have an idea for a course that you want to teach? The deadline for course proposals is July 10 of each year. We also co-sponsor existing courses and workshops on topics of interest to the evolutionary biology and evolutionary informatics communities.