Dear colleagues, It is our great pleasure to announce the first "Taming the BEAST" summer school in China! It will take place in Beijing, July 14-18, 2025. Phylogenetics and phylodynamics are central topics in modern biology. Phylogenetic inferences reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between organisms, whereas phylodynamic inferences reveal the dynamics that lead to the observed relationships. These two fields have many practical applications in disciplines such as epidemiology, developmental biology, paleontology, ecology and even linguistics. However, phylogenetics and phylodynamics are complex and fast-evolving fields. As such, inference tools are not easily accessible to researchers who are not from a computational background. Taming the BEAST is a summer school focusing on the BEAST 2 software and consisting of a mix of invited talks, lectures and hands-on tutorials by leading and renowned experts in the field (including several of the core developers of BEAST 2). The aim of this summer school is to equip participants with the skills necessary to confidently perform their own phylogenetic and phylodynamic inferences in Bayesian settings, while providing them with a firm grasp of the theory behind those inferences. Participants are also highly encouraged to bring their own datasets along and to engage with the organisers and speakers to address any problems specific to their own datasets/analyses. REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN. We welcome applications from graduate students and early-career scientists in the life sciences. Preference will be given to applicants who are not from a computational background and applicants who have already collected/assembled a dataset that they need to analyse. Organizing committee: Chi Zhang (Chinese Academy of Sciences) Rachel Warnock (Friedrich-Alexander Universit??t) Jo??lle Barido-Sottani (Ecole Normale Sup??rieure) Louis du Plessis (ETH Z??rich) Instructors: Sasha Gavryushkina (University of Adelaide) Sophie Seidel (ETH Z??rich) Robert Yuan (ETH Z??rich) Arong Luo (Chinese Academy of Sciences) Xing Xu (Chinese Academy of Sciences) Simon Ho (University of Sydney) Rong Zhang (Duke-NUS Medical School) Walter Xie (University of Auckland) Dates: July 14-18, 2025 (Deadline for registration is April 17). Place: Beijing, China Registration Fee: 1500 CNY (approx 200???) (Registration fee includes all meals during the workshop.) For more information please visit the summer school webpage: https://taming-the-beast.org/workshops/Taming-the-BEAST-Beijing/ For information on previous workshop programs, tutorials etc. please visit https://taming-the-beast.org. We hope to see you there, the Taming the BEAST organising team Tim Vaughan (to subscribe/unsubscribe the EvolDir send mail to golding@mcmaster.ca)