********************Jobs******************** Expenses paid field assistant positions to study the breeding ecology of blue tits and collared flycatchers on the wonderful island of Gotland. For the upcoming field season (20 April-20/30 June 2020) we are looking for an expenses-paid field assistant to join the team working on the Swedish island of Gotland. It is a famous bird study site, with over 40 years of bird ecology monitoring, and additionally an amazingly beautiful and unique location for all bird lovers, a major birding and bird migration hotspot, and a culturally rich location for all Scandinavia lovers. Our current project concerns two species: the blue tit and the collared flycatcher. Apart from general monitoring of both species' breeding we conduct specific research, which now concentrates on colour biology and expression in the blue tit. The work is demanding, requiring long hours spent in the forest in variable weather conditions (although the weather has been very gentle the past few seasons on Gotland), precision in handling the birds and recording the data, and the ability to work in a team. The team will consist of 7-11 assistants, plus an additional collaborating team of similar size from France, staying in another location close by. Basic procedures used during fieldwork involve catching adult birds with mist-nets, ringing of adults and nestlings, morphological measurements of young and adult birds, blood-sampling od some birds for genetic analyses. We provide training on the most crucial procedures, but a basic knowledge of bird morphology and bird handling exp erience is more than welcome. Qualifications: (1) BSc/MSc in Biology, Ecology, Evolution or similar qualification (2) Previous field experience will be a big plus (3) Ability to work in small teams and sociable personality (4) Bird ringing and mist-netting experience is desired but can also be learned on site (5) EU-valid driving licence (6) Fluent in English We will cover for the accommodation (lodging in rooms shared with other field assistants - usually 2 persons per room - in a beautiful & comfortable, large house in the middle of the fieldwork area), travel expenses from and to the study site (within reasonable limits and up to 450 EUR; if more is expected - let's discuss possibilities on a case by case basis), as well as the living expenses. Applications - including a CV, a letter of motivation (1/2 A4 page) and the name of two referees - should be send to Szymon Drobniak szymek.drobniak@gmail.com, ideally as a single PDF file. Full consideration will be given to applications received until the 15th of February. After that date applications will be monitored if any additional assistants would be required. Applications sent after the 20 of March will not be considered. Please do not hesitate to write to me if you have more and specific questions. Dr Szymon Drobniak Jagiellonian University (PL) & University of New South Wales (AU) geralttee@gmail.com ********************WorkshopsCourses******************** Hi all. First of all, as background: SLiM is a software package for creating evolutionary models/simulations that are individual-based and genetically explicit. It is scriptable, flexible, fast, and includes an interactive graphical modeling environment. You can read more about it on its home page (https://messerlab.org/slim/). May 18-22, 2020, a five-day SLiM workshop will be offered at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA). It will be hosted by Daren Card and Timothy Sackton, of Harvard. It will be free, and open to participants outside of the university. HOWEVER, registration is required, a limited number of seats are available, and a set portion of seats will be given to registrants affiliated with Harvard. To apply, please send an email to ALL OF Daren, Timothy, and myself (dcard@fas.harvard.edu, tsackton@g.harvard.edu, bhaller@mac.com) with the info below. Priority for Harvard applicants will end on 15 February; after that date it will be first-come-first-served for all remaining seats so that we can notify everyone of their acceptance in time to make travel arrangements. Early application is advised; these workshops have been filling to capacity. For this workshop, your application email should include: (1) your name, (2) your university or institutional affiliation, (3) a link to a research website or similar academic page, if you have one, (4) a 1-2 sentence description of your level of experience with SLiM and any other forward genetic simulation software, if any, (5) a 1-2 sentence summary of why you want to attend the workshop (i.e., the connection to your research), and (6) 1-2 sentences about any specific topics within SLiM that you hope to learn about in the workshop. Note that you will be responsible for your own lodging and your own transportation. Please do not apply to the workshop unless you are sufficiently serious that you will actually attend, if accepted. The plan is to cover all the major topics in the SLiM manual, starting with lots of introductory material to get beginners up to speed with SLiM and its associated scripting language Eidos, and ending up at advanced topics like non-Wright-Fisher models, tree-sequence recording, continuous-space models, and nucleotide-based models. We won't cover everything in the manual " that would be overwhelming! " but we'll try to cover all the big topics. There will also be time for attendees to work on their own models with help from me, and we may also have time to explore some optional side topics that are of particular interest to those attending each workshop. The workshop will be taught principally using SLiMgui on macOS. Every attendee will need their own Mac laptop. Loaner Mac laptops are unlikely to be available for this workshop; running macOS inside VirtualBox on another operating system is also possible, but please make sure that this works for you before registering. (A Mac is required to run SLiMgui, which is necessary for teaching purposes.) I'm hoping to continue doing workshops in future; if you would like to invite me to give a workshop at your institution, please send me an email (off-list). Cheers, Benjamin C. Haller Messer Lab Cornell University bhaller@mac.com ********************Conferences******************** DO YOU WANT TO BE PART OF MEETING HONORING ONE OF GREATEST & MOST INFLUENTIAL DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGISTS OF THE LAST DECADES? Just send me an email to attend for free & let me know if you are also interested in giving short talk & contributing to special issue of journal Devel.Dyn.. Rui Diogo, PhD in Evol.-Funct. Morphol. & PhD in Hominid Paleobiol., Assoc. Prof. at Howard Univ. College Medicine, Dep. Anat., 520 W St. NW, Numa Adams Building, room 1101, Washington DC 20059, USA.| Fellow of American Association Anatomists Diogo's Lab Website: http://www.ruidiogolab.com Diogo's books: http://www.amazon.com/Rui-Diogo/e/B001JS2K96 Diogo's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rui_Diogo Diogo's researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rui_Diogo Diogo's Lab Twitter: @Rui_Diogo_Lab rui_diogo@hotmail.com ********************Conferences******************** Dear colleagues, We would like to announce the 7th Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Symposium in Turkey (EEBST 2020) which will take place in Istanbul on 8-10 July 2020. EEBST is a symposium organized by the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Society of Turkey (EkoEvo, ekoevo.org) with the aim of bringing scientists and students together and promote the ecology and evolution studies in Turkey. The symposium is in English and well attended by a diverse body of faculty and students from different parts of the world including Europe, North America, and Asia.This year, Koc University will be hosting the symposium. We are pleased to invite oral and poster presentations in all the areas of ecology and evolutionary biology. Early registration and abstract submissions are now open and the deadline is April 30th, 2020. Late registration is between May 1st - July 6th. For any additional information, please contact the organizing committee (iksaglam@ku.edu.tr) or visit https://eebst.org/ Sessions and keynote speakers: - Genome Architecture Keynote: Magnus Nordborg https://www.oeaw.ac.at/gmi/research/research-groups/magnus-nordborg/ - Evolutionary Ecology Keynote: Hanna Kokko http://www.kokkonuts.org/ - Microbiome Ecology Keynote: Sarah Knowles https://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-sarah-knowles - Wildlife Ecology Keynote: Matthew Hayward https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/matthew-hayward - Human Evolution Keynote: Andrea Migliano https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/academic-and-teaching-staff/andrea-migliano - Plant Evolution Keynote: Martyn Lysak http://www.plantcytogenomics.org/ - Conservation Genomics Keynote: Michael R. Miller https://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/michael-miller We hope to see you all in Istanbul. On behalf of the EEBST 2020 Organizing Committee Eren Ada erenada@gmail.com ********************Conferences******************** We would like to invite you to the one-day Speciation Genomics 2020 meeting at St John's College, Cambridge, on the 16th of March. This meeting is organised by Chris Jiggins, Joana Meier, Hilde Schneemann, and Gabriela Montejo-Kovacevich. The symposium will include a series of short talks by empiricists and theoreticians at the forefront of speciation research, followed by a discussion round led by senior researchers. There will also be a poster session. Confirmed speakers so far include Sonya Clegg, Oscar Puebla, Konrad Lohse, Christelle Fraisse and Sean Stankowski. Ole Seehausen, Roger Butlin, and Claudia Bank are confirmed attendees and will help lead discussion groups. To submit an abstract for a talk or poster fill in this form http://bit.ly/2R62lv0 (by the 01/02/2020). REGISTER HERE: http://bit.ly/sp-geno (by the 01/03/2020). The registration fee (pounds 40 standard, pounds 25 students) includes lunch, dinner in the evening and all tea and coffee etc. Note that accommodation is not included we recommend that you look for B&B options at the university accommodation site . This meeting coincides with our annual Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics Symposium (EGGS, https://evolutionarygeneticsandgenomics.com/) to be held the following day on the 17th March we encourage you to attend both meetings. "mgm49@cam.ac.uk"