Several members of the Nielsen Lab went up to Davis for the Spring 2023 edition of the Bay Area Population Genomics (BAPG) conference. Thank you to all the organizers for putting this fun day of science together!

The lab went for a beautiful hike yesterday in Redwood Regional Park. We were lucky to have Sasha tell us all about the genetics and ecology of the redwoods around us!

Postdocs Lenore and Chao and PhD Students Andrew and Yun traveled to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island this past week to attend the Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics conference. We all enjoyed hearing about the great work in statistical genetics and presenting on our own work. Thank you to the organizers for putting on such a great conference!

The Nielsen Lab hosted the Fall 2022 Bay Area Population Genomics (BAPG) conference at UC Berkeley. PhD students Yun and Andrew served as organizers and emcees. It was a day full of science and great food. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible, including our speakers, poster presenters, and our corporate sponsors Ancestry, Variant Bio, D2G Oncology, and Personalis. (And thank you to Maya and Stacy Li from the Sudmant Lab for the great pictures!)

Lab members Debora Brandt and Emma Steigerwald, with a team of interdisciplinary collaborators, published a piece on how advances in neural machine translation systems can transform the way science is communicated– from a currently very English-centric hub to a multilingual network– and why this shift is such an important one to support! They share concrete actions individuals and institutions can take to contribute. You can find the paper “Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia” under the Papers tab.

We had a lovely BBQ with Nielsen Lab members and friends at the San Leandro Marina Park. We will definitely miss Hongru’s delicious lamb skewers!

Several members of the Nielsen Lab attended the Evolution 2022 conference in Cleveland from June 24-28. It was a week packed with great science (and a bit of baseball too). Thank you to the American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists for putting this conference together. We’re already looking forward to next year!

As part of the UC MEXUS (University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States) program, lab members Andrew and Diana traveled to the Laboratorio Internacional de Investigación sobre el Genoma Humano (LIIGH) at the UNAM campus in Juriquilla, Mexico. It was a great opportunity to chat with collaborators, present on our research projects, and discuss all the great research happening at LIIGH. A big thank you to Diego Ortega del Vecchyo and his lab for hosting us!