We are conducting a survey to see how many people would likely attend a major conference on the Evolution & Ecology of Nematodes, which would be held in 2010 at a site in Europe (tentatively in the UK). This conference is intended as the successor to the wildly successful EMBO Workshop on the evolutionary biology of Caenorhabditis held in Portugal in May, 2006. This meeting would cover the evolution of Caenorhabditis species and also of other nematodes. Participants would include basic researchers working in the areas of population genetics, molecular evolution, genome evolution, experimental evolution, developmental evolution, biodiversity and phylogenetics, ecology, and the evolution of parasitism. The meeting would be for both bioinformaticians and wet-lab biologists. The overall goals are to bring together people from diverse fields to further develop the Caenorhabditis system for comparative biology and to better connect it to the wider context of the phylum Nematoda.
To help our application for funding to hold the conference in Cambridge, we need to know how many people would be interested in attending. If you are inclined to attend such a conference, please email either of us with replies to the following questions:
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What is your position? (principal investigator/postdoc/graduate student/other)
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If not a PI, with what lab are you affiliated? (give name of PI)
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If a PI, how many people from your lab would attend?
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If you attended the 2006 meeting, have you initiated any new collaborations or begun new programs of research as a result? [Note that we may quote some responses in our application.]
Thanks in advance,
Eric Haag (University of Maryland) ehaag@umd.edu
Avril Coghlan (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) alc@sanger.ac.uk