Summer school 2022

The Tartu Summer school on Evolution, Genomics and Medicine 2022 

28.11 – 09.12.2022

This is the second edition of a series of annual international summer schools that brings together evolution, genetics and medicine.

The school is organised by the cGEM group at the Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia within the frames of H2020 grant cGEM.

Programme

The course is focussed on methods and resources for identifying the present-day consequences of past natural selection for phenotypic variation and susceptibility to disease, and will cover advanced methods for inferring evolutionary histories from genomics data and linking them to large-scale genomic and functional datasets. Lectures introducing theoretical concepts and methods will be combined with workshops designed to give hands-on experience.

Anders Eriksson: Evolutionary theory of complex traits

Karoline Kuchenbaeker (U. College London, UK): Trans-ethnic GWAS of complex traits

Vasili Pankratov: Tree-based based methods of evolutionary inference

Danat Yermakovich: Introgression from archaic humans

Mayukh Mondal: Deep learning methods for evolutionary inference

Tõnis Org: Epigenetics and cell-based functional assays

Details of the schedule can be found here.

The school will be held online November 28 – December 9 and will be free of charge. 

(Originally announced as a “in person” event to be held on 5-9.09.2022. Due to huge international interest, the event was changed for online event)

Application

The course is aimed at PhD students of mathematics and bioinformatics with an interest in evolution. We also welcome students from biological and medical backgrounds with sufficient background in computational analysis, advanced undergraduates, and postdocs.

Applications are to be sent by email to anders.eriksson@ut.ee.

The application should contain:

• Full contact data (name, affiliation, postal address, email address)
• A brief CV containing prior studies and/or positions
• A one-paragraph description of scientific interest and motivation
• List of publications (if any)

Please send all relevant information in one pdf file (not in the email text).

Please send all relevant information in one pdf file (not in the email text).

The deadline for applications is November 14 and we shall notify all applicants by November 18.

Please do not hesitate to contact the organisers for any questions (Dr Anders Eriksson, anders.eriksson@ut.ee).

Pre-requisites

Software: Please follow the instructions on https://posit.co/downloads/ to download and install R and Rstudio on your computers (they will be needed to follow the practicals on Tuesday and Wednesday). In Rstudio, please also install the packages data.table and ggplot2. For help on installing packages in R, see this link: https://derekogle.com/IFAR/supplements/installations/InstallPackagesRStudio.html. Please also do not hesitate to contact us if you require assistance.

Tartu university accounts and HPC access: accounts for the course have been set up for you and you should already have received emails from the IT system requesting you to set up passwords. To access our HPC environment you will also need a VPN connection to Tartu university (https://tunnel.ut.ee). See https://wiki.ut.ee/display/AA/OpenVPN+-+Windows (windows), https://wiki.ut.ee/display/AA/OpenVPN+-+Mac+OS+X (macx) or https://wiki.ut.ee/display/AA/OpenVPN+-+Linux (linux) for details. Access to the HPC environment will be through a secure shell (ssh) in your terminal environment.