The history and organization of the Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics

Abstract

With the advent of high-throughput genome sequencing, bioinformatics training has become essential for research in evolutionary biology and related fields. However, individual research groups are often not in the position to teach students about the most up-to-date methodology in the field. To fill this gap, extended bioinformatics courses have been developed by various institutions and provide intense training over the course of two or more weeks. Here, we describe our experience with the organization of a course in one of the longest-running extended bioinformatics series of workshops, the Evomics Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics that takes place biennially in the UNESCO world heritage town of Český Krumlov, Czech Republic. We list the key ingredients that make this workshop successful in our view, explain the routine for workshop organization that we have optimized over the years, and describe the most important lessons that we have learned from it. We report the results of a survey conducted among past workshop participants that quantifies measures of effective teaching and provide examples of how the workshop setting has led to the cross-fertilisation of ideas and ultimately scientific progress. We expect that our account may be useful for other groups aiming to set up their own extended bioinformatics courses.

Rewilded horses in European nature conservation – a genetics, ethics and welfare perspective

“…Genomic approaches thus offer advantages over traditional conservation genetic methods that are limited to few marker genes or noncoding microsatellites, in that they increase reliability of genetic metrics, are more widely applicable, and avoid primer design and marker testing (Shafer et al, 2015). Dedicated workshops and meetings provide opportunities not only to scientists but also nature managers and practitioners to learn the application and interpretation of genomic analyses methods, to interact and exchange across disciplines, and to stay updated on novel methodologies (Schweizer et al 2021;Barth et al, 2023).…”

Genomics and conservation: Guidance from training to analyses and applications

“…Stephen O'Brien's ConGen course; https://conservationgenetics.org/). For instance, a semester‐long interdisciplinary, distributed graduate course between institutes in the United States and Europe combines local teaching with distant learning to teach landscape genetics (Wagner et al., 2012), while the annual 2‐week Evomics Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics held in Czech Republic brings up‐to‐date training in bioinformatics to students and early‐career researchers across Europe (Barth et al., 2023).…”