Here is the press release for Year 3 BEACON funding to UI. Feel free to pass it along to your media friends!
Reminder: we do have a BEACON handbook for potential and current students and postdocs. Here it is: BEACONStudentPostdocInfo2012
Matt Pennell, Anne Guttman, and Daniel Beck and I just returned from an NSF Site Visit and external review at MSU. Presentations went well, reviewers were suitably impressed, and collaborations were deepened. It was good that we had student/postdoc representation (Thanks to Matt for setting that up).
Matt is now the UI representative on the grad/postdoc BEACON council. He has plans and ideas, which I’m sure he’ll share shortly.
The bottom line: the reviewers and NSF were very, very impressed.
Thanks, everyone, for being a great team!
The official call for proposals will be released Dec 12th, and they will be due around 15 January. Criteria will be much the same as last year. Collaborations with other BEACON institutions is likely to be even MORE important this year.
Get ready! Get set! …
BEACON seminars are every Friday at 12.30 in LSS 144, with participants from UI, UT, UW, MSU, and NCA&T. Topics vary from week to week. Sometimes they are regular science seminars, sometimes introductions to potential collaborators’ research areas. These are a good way to stay “in the loop” with BEACON.
Use this thread to announce BEACON affiliated classes/seminars and other educational opportunities available to IBESTians.
Instructor: C. Titus Brown, ctb@msu.edu
This course will run from 9/1/11 – 12/8/11 (the Michigan State schedule) and will be offered by videoconference at UW Seattle, U Idaho, and UT Austin as part of the BEACON Center collaboration. Please, no auditing.
MSU location: BEACON conference room, BPS 1455 A.
Instructor: Alex Shingleton, shingle9@msu.edu
The purpose of the course is to provide you with a working understanding of biological evolution so that you will be able to form productive collaborations with evolutionary biologists. This means that you will need to know much more than just the ‘facts’ of evolutionary biology – you will need to be able to ‘think’ like an evolutionary biologist. Life-scientists in general, and evolutionary biologists specifically, have a particular way of looking at the world, a perspective that may seem unfamiliar, unusual or even wrong to those outside of science. The overall goal of the course is for you to begin to view the world from this perspective.
This course will run from 9/1/11 – 12/8/11 (the Michigan State schedule) and will be offered by videoconference at UW Seattle, U Idaho, and UT Austin as part of the BEACON Center collaboration.
MSU Location: BEACON classroom, 1440 BPS
If you are not at MSU and interested in this course please email shingle9@msu.edu to confirm your enrollment. MSU students need to enroll by emailing craftl@cns.msu with your name and PID.
The syllabus to the course can be found at www.msu.edu/~shingle9/Syllabus.htm.
Divergent natural selection is a central process leading to adaptation and speciation in the wild. Generally, studies focus on single traits with adaptive value in novel environments. However, selection in novel environments may often be multidimensional – acting on many traits simultaneously – and this may be necessary for adaptation to novel environments and for speciation to occur. The dimensionality of selection has far-reaching implications for linking genotype to phenotype and phenotype to fitness. Recently, studies have identified the genetic basis of individual adaptive traits in natural populations and we are beginning to understand the genetic architecture of such traits. However, little is known about the genetic architecture of multidimensional adaptation and how that genetic architecture may influence evolutionary change. This cross-institution graduate seminar will explore these topics. A primary objective will be to write a joint review article synthesizing existing data and theoretical studies. We will consider published studies to develop expectations for the genetic architecture of multidimensional adaptation and also suggest research directions in systems that could lend additional insight.
Graduate students and postdocs are invited to participate. Not all participants need contribute to the review, but those who do so substantially will be co-authors. The class will begin early September.
Contact Jenny boughman@msu.edu or Bree rosenblum@uidaho.edu for information, and to sign up.
I (James) recently returned from the annual BEACON Congress at MSU. Rather than try to summarize the meeting, here are some ideas/announcements specifically for our IBEST/BEACON group.
IBEST came up as a mature example of where BEACON is going, several times. I hope we can continue to, ahem, shine the evolution light.
(from Danielle)
1. Go to the BEACON website (www.beacon-center.org)
2. Click on “BEACON Events” in the menu bar
3. Below the calendar is a link to the scheduling spreadsheet – click it!
4. Look over the available dates and decide which one you want
5. Email the appropriate thrust group leader(s):
TG1: Tom Schmidt and Titus Brown
TG2: Rob Pennock and Kay Holekamp
TG3: Fred Dyer and Phil McKinley
That’s it!
Here is an interesting description of how NIH maps publications to grants. Good reading for people who have either. 
http://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2011/05/18/mapping-publications-to-grants/
Jack will be presenting work on his beacon project about genomic fingerprints of speciation in the presence of gene flow. Come ask him hard questions!
We meet at 12:30, every Friday, in LSS 144.
