A schedule is available.
Key information and dates:
- Dates: 26-28th November 2024.
- Location: National Museum of Nature and Science, Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan.
After the event
In line with the SMBE guidelines, this website will remain online until at least the end of 2027 as an archive of the event. A report on the event should also shortly be available on the SMBE website.
Photos:
Topics
The pathogen evolutionary biology community is getting closer to being able to capture all molecular variation, and looking at it deeply both within single hosts and across the entire population during transmission. To fully link the new scale of data with sound evolutionary theory, we need strong collaborations between microbiologists, evolutionary biologists, computational biologists, statisticians and mathematical modellers and communicable disease controllers.
This meeting will bring the community together to reflect on advances made during the pandemic, and how this will affect our future research. Through a series of invited talks, we will explore the leading edge of pathogen pangenome evolution, including:
- The use of metagenomics for pathogen surveillance.
- Analysis and interpretation of selection in pathogen populations
- The role of evolutionary analysis in emerging infectious diseases, spanning bacteria and viral species including SARS-CoV-2
- New tools for evolutionary and pangenome analysis, including genome graphs.
- The union of evolutionary and epidemic modelling for inferring outbreak and epidemic dynamics.
This forum will also allow for trainees and early-career investigators to learn from and connect with many of the leading researchers in the field.
Understanding infectious disease pathogenesis and transmission through the lens of evolution is a critical area of research. One or two symposia would not be able to cover this breadth of topics, whereas the additional time of a satellite meeting would allow these topics to be covered in sufficient detail. We are delighted that SMBE have given support for this satellite meeting on pangenome evolution.
Speakers
We have the following confirmed speakers:
- Hsiao-Han Chang, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
- Nicholas Croucher, Imperial College London, UK.
- Christophe Fraser, University of Oxford, UK.
- Jemma Geoghegan, University of Otago, New Zealand.
- Rebecca Gladstone, University of Oslo, Norway.
- Danielle Ingle, University of Melbourne, Australia.
- Jumpei Ito, University of Tokyo, Japan.
- Guillaume Meric, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, Australia.
- Marco Molari, University of Basel, Switzerland.
- Sofia Morfopoulou, UCL, UK.
- Evangelos Mourkas, Uppsala University, Sweden.
- Leah Roberts, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
- Liam Shaw, University of Oxford, UK.
- Gerry Tonkin-Hill, University of Melbourne, Australia.
Funders
We are grateful to our funders, without whom we would not be able to organise this meeting:
Organisers
- Stephen Bentley, Wellcome Sanger Institute
- Caroline Colijn, Simon Fraser University
- Jukka Corander, University of Oslo
- Claire Gorrie, University of Melbourne
- John Lees, EMBL-EBI
- Fiona Whelan, University of Manchester
- Koji Yahara, National Institute of Infectious Diseases (Japan)
More information
The conference will take place in the Auditorium in Japan Gallery at the National Museum of Nature and Science, located in Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan.
Major airports in Japan:
- Haneda airport, Tokyo (30-45 minutes to venue)
- Narita airport, Tokyo (1hr to venue)
- Osaka airport (4hrs to venue)
Visa details can be found on the ministry of foreign affairs website, including a list of nationalities which can obtain an exemption.
Agenda
A schedule is available.
Hybrid attendance
Virtual attendees will be able to stream the talks, or watch recordings after the event. Session chairs will ensure questions from the online audience are included in the sessions.
Bursaries for early career researchers
We hope to offer a number of partial or full bursaries for early career researchers with accepted abstracts. This is available during abstract submission, please select ‘yes’ for the ECR option, and follow the details to submit your request.
Code of conduct
Our code of conduct is the same as SMBE’s, which can be found here: https://www.smbe.org/smbe/ABOUT/CodeofConduct.aspx