Back from Halifax

After driving through the night, we got home from Halifax this morning. The SMBE meeting was excellent as usual, and I agree with Dan Hartl that it's the best meeting for evolutionary genetics. With excellent talks and posters on topics ranging from population genetics to comparative genomics (and many people discussing both and everything in between in a single 15 minute talk), it's hard to find a better meeting.

I also had the opportunity to meet Rosie Redfield, John Logsdon, Jason Stajich, Reed Cartwright, and Jacob Tennessen. We got together for dinner, along with Professor Steve Steve, to discuss blogging and open science. It turns out that I also have an academic connection with a bunch of these bloggers -- Jason and I graduated from the same college in the same year, Reed's PhD advisor was my advisor's advisor, and Rosie did her post-doc in the same lab as my advisor. And I was surprised that I hadn't met Jason before, given that we share overlapping interests (he was a co-author on the human-chimp copy-number divergence paper from Matt Hahn's lab).

Finally, it was announced that John's school, the University of Iowa, will be hosting the meeting in 2009. Next year's meeting will be in Barcelona -- the combination of cost and the timing of the meeting will probably keep me from going -- but I'll most likely be in Iowa City the following year.