Dear colleague, If you're going to SMBE, consider registering for the GENomic History Inference Strategies Tournament (GENHIST) kickoff event. The event will be the afternoon of the first day of the conference, Sunday at 2:00 pm. In population genomics, there are a dizzying array of potential data analysis approaches to infer population history, aspects of natural selection, or other evolutionary properties from data. Although methods developers try to evaluate their approaches, those evaluations can be unconsciously biased or may not reflect the experiences of real-world users. GENHIST aims to create an annual forum in which the community can test inference approaches in an unbiased fashion. Each year, the GENHIST organizers will release simulated population genomic data sets and host a competition to infer various aspects of the processes that generated those data. From the submissions, the community will learn what approaches perform well or poorly in particular circumstances. This year will be the first GENHIST competition. We will have 4 tasks, ranging from simple to complex. In the simplest task, competitors will be given a Variant Call Format (VCF) file of data from a population that was simulated to undergo a collapse in size. They will be asked to infer the timing and magnitude of that collapse. More complex tasks will involve multiple populations, migration from ghost populations, and/or background selection. Competitors who perform well will be asked to join as authors on the publication describing the year's competition. At the kickoff event, we will walk you through accessing the competition data, briefly analyzing it with dadi and/or MSMC, and submitting your first results! We expect this event and the overall competition to be great for trainees, to get experience with population genomic inference. For questions, please contact Ryan Gutenkunst , chair of the Organizing Committee for GENHIS rgutenk@arizona.edu (to subscribe/unsubscribe the EvolDir send mail to golding@mcmaster.ca)