I usually set goals for conferences (see here), but not a specific itinerary. Inspired by other bloggers (such as Jeremy Fox on Dynamic Ecology), I decided to plan my itinerary for the ESEB conference next week. ESEB stands for the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, and the ESEB conference takes place every other year in a different city. This year it’s in Lisbon!
I am sure it’ll be a great conference!
Monday Aug 19th
Arrival, some sightseeing, maybe a work meeting with a collaborator. Registration and then to the welcome reception! I hope to see all the speakers & poster presenters of the drug resistance symposium there!
Tuesday Aug 20th
On this day I have no difficult choices to make 🙂
The day starts with a plenary talk by Juliette de Meaux, who will talk about “reconciling molecular and evolutionary biology” using Arabidopsis as a model system.
Then I am off to Symposium 22: The evolution and genetics of drug resistance which I co-organize with Sarah Cobey, Fredrik Inglis and Gabriel Perron. You can find the schedule here. During the Tuesday poster session I’ll probably hang around the Symposium 22 posters most of the time.
I will try to write a separate post about all the great talks & posters of our symposium. I hope to see many of you there!
Wednesday Aug 21st
The day starts with a plenary by Dieter Ebert on the “population genetics of host-parasite coevolution.”
Then I will head to Symposium 10 on genomics and experimental evolution, with talks about adaptation in bacteria in hosts and in the lab.
After lunch I will move to Symposium 13 on rapid evolution, and look forward especially to Richard Neher’s talk on “HIV coevolution with the host immune system” and Hildegard Uecker’s talk on “evolutionary rescue in structured populations”. Unfortunately, I will have to miss this talk by Sally Otto and this one by Claudia Bank, both on “adaptive mutations in/to different environments.”
There is a poster session in the afternoon, where I will certainly go see this poster by Ricardo Ramiro about adaptation to the gut of the mouse, and this poster by Frederic Hopital about detecting selection in chickens.
I also plan to look at this poster about diversity in SIV (George Shireff), this one about experimental evolution in mice (Mirian Linnenbrink), and two posters about the evolutionary advantage of sex (one by Su-Chan Park and one by Daniel Weissman).
Thursday Aug 22nd
Thursday starts with a plenary talk about evolution in cancer by Mel Greaves.
The rest of the morning I’ll spend at Symposium 1 which focuses on experimental evolution and fitness landscapes.
Thursday afternoon is free for sightseeing or organized tours!
Friday Aug 23rd
The plenary speaker of this day is Trudy Mackay. I have never seen her talk, so I am excited to see this famous geneticist speak about the genotype-phenotype map of fruit flies. There is a great little video about her on YouTube.
After the plenary I will go back to Symposium 1 which focuses on experimental evolution and fitness landscapes, where I will also stay after lunch.
I am still undecided for the rest of Friday afternoon.
Later on Friday there is another poster session. I plan to go see this poster on fixation probabilities (Ivo Chelo) and many others in the experimental evolution symposium (Symp 1).
Saturday Aug 24rd
The last day of the conference. The plenary speaker is Virpi Lummaa and she talks about longevity in humans.
I’ll then go to Symposium 8 on epigenetic variation.
Saturday afternoon is filled with more plenaries about speciation (Roger Butlin), species selection (Rochard FitzJohn) and a talk by Rolf Hoekstra with the great title: “♀ ♂ + –“. At night there is the conference dinner.
Your itinerary?
The ESEB website is really nice and I encourage everyone to spend some time with it before flying to Portugal. I’d love to hear where others are planning to go! I hope there will be a pdf version of the entire program soon.
I will be following the #ESEB2013 hashtag on Twitter to find out about the sessions I’ll be missing. Let’s hope there will be wifi!
Being A Better Scientist 
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