Eisen Lab Blog

postdoc at UMN studying the phytobiome

We are currently hiring a postdoc to study the determinants and consequences of the plant microbiome (bacterial, fungal, and viral), including work spanning the globally-distributed Nutrient Network experiment (www.nutnet.org). We’re looking for applicants with experience and ability in lab techniques for high-throughput sequencing and skills for manipulating and analyzing metagenomic data sets. Applicants will work with a team of PIs, postdocs, and graduate students spanning University of Minnesota’s Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and Plant Pathology departments. A fuller description is attached. We’d like to hire as soon as possible.

Applications can be submitted via the UMN Human Resources website, http://tinyurl.com/negnlvy .

Please pass this information along to potential applicants or others who may know of good applicants.

Thanks,
Elizabeth

Macrosystems-Post-DocJobAd2015.pdf

Faculty Positions at University of Arizona- GI Microbiology and Virology

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and
BIO5 Institute are supporting two tenure-eligible faculty hires to be based at the School of Animal and Comparative Biomedical Sciences (ACBS).
Successful applicants will also become a "BIO5 fellows". ACBS houses over
120 faculty and staff working across diverse areas of agriculture and biomedical sciences, while the BIO5 Institute is an interdisciplinary research unit bringing together researchers from Agriculture, Engineering, Medicine, Pharmacy and Science. Both positions offer excellent opportunities for collaborations with faculty members in basic science and clinical departments throughout campus and include access to start-up funding and laboratory facilities.

*Assistant/Associate Professor in Gastrointestinal Microbiology*: We are seeking candidates with a primary disciplinary focus in gastrointestinal microbiology and a secondary focus in gut-brain axis biology, obesity, colorectal cancer, host-microbe interactions, food safety, metagenomics, metabolomics, or microbial pathogenesis are encouraged to apply. Expertise in the application of advanced computational biology and wet lab approaches to further understanding of the human and vertebrate animal microbiome is preferred. For detailed information about this position, including how to apply online, please see:
www.uacareertrack.com/applicants/Central?quickFind!6943

*Assistant/Associate Professor in Virology:* We seek individuals with a demonstrated interest in applying virology and immunology approaches to understanding animal and/or human health and developing novel therapeutic approaches. In keeping with the BIO5 mandate, expertise in the application of advanced computational biology approaches to investigating virus-host, virus-virus or virus-microbe interactions is preferred. For detailed information about this position, including how to apply online, please see:
www.uacareertrack.com/applicants/Central?quickFind!6940

EMBO Symposium “A New Age of Discovery for Aquatic Microeukaryotes” January 26-29, 2016

Just got this email announcement for this meeting from my Program Officer at the Moore Foundation. And I note – I checked out the invited speaker list and it looks very good and relatively well balanced in terms of gender diversity.

Colleagues,

Save the date!

With great enthusiasm I would like to share information about an upcoming EMBO Symposium on aquatic protist ecology and evolution stimulated by the completion of the Marine Microbial Eukaryote Transcriptome Sequencing Project (MMETSP) and major milestones achieved by the Tara Oceans and Malaspina expeditions. The goal is to bring together the MMETSP, Tara Oceans, Malaspina, and well-established protist model systems communities. The Symposium will take place in Heidelberg, Germany from 26–29 January 2016.

http://www.embo-embl-symposia.org/symposia/2016/EES16-01/index.html

Invited speakers include the following scientists whose specialties range from marine and freshwater microeukaryote ecology to studies of long-standing protist model systems such as Tetrahymena and Chlamydomonas:

http://www.embo-embl-symposia.org/symposia/2016/EES16-01/speakers_gallery/index.html

The sessions are expected to be:

1. And You May Ask Yourself, “Well…How Did I Get Here?”: Biodiversity Patterns across Space and Time
2. Love–Hate Relationships: Intimate Interactions, from Trophic Interactions to Symbiosis
3. Weird and Wonderful Organelles and Symbionts—Photosynthesis, Respiration, and Beyond
4. Knock, Knock—Who’s There? Extracellular Signaling
5. Genetic Transportation: Causes and Consequences of Gene Exchange in Protists
6. Small Microbe, Big World: Microeukaryotes in Aquatic Ecosystems
7. Situation Normal, All Stressed Out
8. Evolutionary Tipping Points: How Do Protists Adapt?

The organizers will be selecting poster and additional oral presentations from the submitted abstracts. The abstract deadline is 22 October 2015, and the registration deadline is 3 December 2015.

Please share this announcement with your colleagues.

The Association of Computational Learning Only Invites Men to Speak at their Annual Meetings 2004-2015.

I have been pointed to a meeting series by a colleague.  The meeting is the “Conference on Learning Theory” brought to use by the The Association of Computational Learning.

Since 2004 they have had 31 Invited Speakers at their annual meeting.  30 of which have been men.  That comes to 97% men.  3% women.  Worst I have ever seen I think.

UPDATE 2:45 PM.  Note – I am not trying to target the speakers here.  They were not the ones who planned these meetings.  They were just the invited speakers who, over the years, happened to be almost all men.  It is the organizers of the meeting who need to be questioned about this …  Some of these speakers may very well be dead against having a series with so few female speakers.

The list of Sponsors for their most recent meeting includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo.  Time to pressure those companies and the other sponsors to drop sponsorship for this organization and their meeting.

UPDATE #2 4:00 PM.  I have been told that there are active efforts underway by some members of the community to fix the underrepresentation of women as invited speakers in this meeting series. Stay tuned.  
Here is the breakdown of speakers over the years.

Invited Speakers for 2015

Invited Speakers 2014

  • Michael Jordan 
  • Yishay Mansour Yishay Mansour

Invited Speakers 2013

  • Ralf Herbrich 
  • Sanjeev Arora 
  • Yann LeCun 

Invited Speakers 2012

  • Andrew Ng
  • Arkadi Nemirovski
  • Dimitris Achlioptas
Invited Speakers 2011

  • William T. Freeman Freeman
  • David  J. Hand Hand

Invited Speakers 2010

  • Noga Alon
  • Naom Nisan

Invited Speakers 2009

  • Piotr Indyk my picture
  • Adam Tauman Kalai, Adam Kalai

Invited Speakers 2008

  • Peter GrünwaldPhoto
  • Robin Hanson Photo
  • Dan Klein Photo
  • Gabor Lugosi Photo

  • Dana Ron 
  • Santosh Vempala 

Invited SPeakers 2006

  • Luc Devroye 
  • Gyorgy TuránPhoto of Gyorgy Turan
  • Vladimir VovkVovk's photo

Invited Speakers 2005

  • Sergiu Hart 
  • Satinder Singh

Invited Speakers 2004

  • Michael Kearns[PHOTO]
  • Stephen BoydStephen Boyd photo
  • Moses Charikar

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Yet another mostly male meeting (YAMMM) from Cold Spring Harbor

I guess this would go down in “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” or something like that. A few weeks ago, I posted an anonymous guest post about the lack of female speakers at the Programming for Biology workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) – Programming for Biology.  This got a response from Cold Spring Harbor on Twitter claiming they do work to have diverse speakers at their meetings.

Then I got an email last week inviting me to Cold Spring Harbor meeting on the History of DNA Sequencing with a truly awful gender ratio.  So I wrote a blog post about that: Cold Spring Harbor presents the men’s only view on the evolution of sequencing.  And also started a discussion about this on Twitter.

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And in response to some comments from some of the CSHL Meeting people I decided to look into the past meetings in the same history of science series and was saddened with the incredibly low # of female speakers at all the meetings in this series. So I posted about that …

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And had more discussions on Twitter where CSHL made some claims about these History of Science meetings being a special case (not buying their argument, just reporting what they said).

And I thought I could have a relaxing Fourth of July weekend not spending my time dealing with Cold Spring Harbor Meetings.  And then, well, I got an email from CSHL that I just looked at a few minutes ago.  This email invited me to one of their “CSHL Asia Conferences”.

I clicked on the link and when to the meeting site: Biological Rhythms and sadly I got sucked into YAMMM (yet another mostly male meeting) land.  Here are the details on the organizers and presenters as far as I could sort out.  I have labelled people I infer to be likely male in yellow and likely female in green.  (I note I accept that a binary male vs. female representation of gender is less than ideal but I think in general this is a useful thing to look and to make some hypotheses for to assess meetings).

Organizers:

  1. Carla Green, UT Southwestern, USA
  2. Michael Hastings, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK
  3. Joseph Takahashi, HHMI/UT Southwestern, USA
  4. Hiroki Ueda, University of Tokyo/RIKEN, Japan
  5. Han Wang, Soochow University, China

Speakers

  1. Joseph Takahashi, HHMI/UT Southwestern Medical Center, USA 
  2. Ravi Allada, Northwestern University, USA 
  3. Joseph Bass, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, USA 
  4. Deborah Bell-Pedersen, Texas A&M University, USA 
  5. Nicolas Cermakian, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, CANADA 
  6. Xinnian Dong, Duke University, USA 
  7. Yoshitaka Fukada, University of Tokyo, JAPAN 
  8. Carla Green, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA 
  9. Jinhu Guo, Sun Yat-Sen University, China 
  10. Fang Han, Peking University People’s Hospital of Beijing, CHINA 
  11. Qun He, China Agricultural University, China 
  12. John Hogenesch, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, USA 
  13. Zhili Huang, Fudan University, China 
  14. Takao Kondo, Nagoya University/Div. of Biological Science, JAPAN 
  15. Katja Lamia, The Scripps Research Institute, USA 
  16. Cheng Chi Lee, University of Texas Health Science Center Houston, USA 
  17. Yi Liu, UT Southwestern Medical Center, USA 
  18. Chang Liu, Nanjing Normal University, China 
  19. Hugh Piggins, University of Manchester, UNITED KINGDOM 
  20. Till Roenneberg, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, GERMANY 
  21. Louis Ptacek, HHMI/University of California San Francisco, USA 
  22. Hiroki Ueda, RIKEN Kobe Institute, JAPAN 
  23. David Virshup, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, SINGAPORE 
  24. Han Wang, Soochow University, China 
  25. Charles Weitz, Harvard Medical School, USA 
  26. David Whitmore, University College London, UNITED KINGDOM 
  27. Ying Xu, Soochow University, China 
  28. Xiaodong Xu, Hubei Normal University, China 
  29. Erquan Zhang, National Institute of Biological Sciences, China 
  30. Zhangwu Zhao, China Agricultural University, China
So that is 30 speakers.  Only 29 of which could I find information on the web to make a hypothesis of gender.  Of those 29, I inferred 6 – or 20% to be female.  That is just really low for biological sciences.  I am sorry Cold Spring Harbor but you are just not doing a good enough job with diversity.  Scratch that, you are doing a bad job.  Sad to see.  
——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Kudos to California Academy of Sciences for Responding (Well) to Gender Bias Issue at Meeting They Are Hosting

Just a quick post of a Storify relating to a meeting at the Calacademy:

//storify.com/phylogenomics/california-academy-of-sciences-responds-well-to-ge/embed?border=false//storify.com/phylogenomics/california-academy-of-sciences-responds-well-to-ge.js?border=false[View the story “California Academy of Sciences responds (well) to gender bias of meeting they are hosting” on Storify]
——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

LiveStreaming 7/27-28 – Workshop: Computational Advances in Microbiome Research

**Please forward to interested colleagues. Flyer attached.**

The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) invites you to join the live stream of our Investigative Workshop, "Computational Advances in Microbiome Research," to be held July 27-28, 2015, at NIMBioS.

Objectives: Recent years have seen a tremendous upswing in microbial community research, ranging from studies of the human microbiome to investigations of biogeochemical cycling in global soil and oceans and coral mucus ecosystems. This has been triggered in large part by the decreasing cost, increasing ubiquity, and democratization of analysis methods for high-throughput sequencing, which has made both amplification-based and shotgun metagenomic profiling of microbial communities accessible to diverse research fields. Microbial community studies have a long history derived from a variety of research areas, however, including ecology, soil and ocean biochemistry, human and environmental toxicology, air quality and environmental monitoring, agriculture, and biodefense. As the methods necessary for modern data analysis have become more complex, new computational approaches have developed independently in many of these subfields, but there have been few opportunities to integrate knowledge and bioinformatic techniques across microbial community research areas.

The overarching goal of this workshop is to bring together and integrate novel bioinformatic techniques from diverse areas of microbial community research. This will allow us more specifically to:

  • Share the state of the art in microbial community analysis from diverse fields.
  • Identify techniques from one field that are useful in others.
  • Identify gaps in computational and statistical techniques not currently addressed in any subfields.
  • Identify gaps in biological knowledge that could be addressed by new quantitative methods.

The workshop is designed as a small, focused workshop bringing together the top thought leaders in computational microbial community analysis techniques from a variety of biological application areas. We anticipate this will foster new ideas, accelerate the pace of biological discovery by disseminating current techniques across fields, provide a starting point for new collaborations, and identify gaps that might be targeted by future funding opportunities. Participation in the workshop is by invitation only.

Co-Organizers: Jill Banfield, Earth and Planetary Science and Environmental Science, Policy and Management, Univ. of California, Berkeley and Curtis Huttenhower, Biostatistics (Computational Biology and Bioinformatics), School of Public Health, Harvard Univ.

Live Stream. The Workshop will be streamed live. Note that NIMBioS Investigative Workshops involve open discussion and not necessarily a succession of talks. In addition, the schedule as posted may change during the Workshop. To view the live stream, visit http://www.nimbios.org/videos/livestream. Join the discussion on Twitter using #CAMRws.

For more information, visit http://www.nimbios.org/workshops/WS_microbiome

The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) (http://www.nimbios.org) brings together researchers from around the world to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries to investigate solutions to basic and applied problems in the life sciences. NIMBioS is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

microbiomeWS_flyer.pdf

Cold Spring Harbor presents the men’s only view on the evolution of sequencing

On June 5 I posted a guest blog post by an anonymous person writing about the Programming for Biology workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Labs: Guest post on Yet Another Mostly Male Meeting (YAMMM) – Programming for Biology 

And this post generated some responses including yesterday a series of responses from whomever is behind the Cold Spring Harbor Meetings Twitter account.

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Sounds great.  And I retweeted all of these.

And then I got an email invite to a new Cold Spring Harbor Meeting: The Evolution of Sequencing Technology: A Half Century of Progress

With a long long list of speakers.  Alas, the gender ratio here of speakers is abyssmal.  I have highlighted men in yellow and women in green (with the caveat that I always try to giver that assigning gender from names or appearance or records is not always accurate)

  1. Mark Adams, J. Craig Venter Institute
  2. Gillian Air, University of Oklahoma
  3. Shankar Balasubramanian, University of Cambridge, UK
  4. Hagan Bayley, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd.
  5. David Bentley, Illumina Cambridge, Ltd
  6. Sydney Brenner, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
  7. Nigel Brown, University of Edinburgh, UK
  8. George Brownlee, University of Oxford, UK 
  9. Graham Cameron, Bioinformatics Resource, Australia EMBL
  10. Piero Carninci, RIKEN Ctr.for Life Science Technologies, Japan
  11. Norman Dovichi, University of Notre Dame
  12. J. William Efcavitch, Molecular Assemblies, Inc.
  13. Miguel Garcia-Sancho, University of Edinburgh, UK
  14. Mark Gerstein, Yale University 
  15. Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago
  16. Walter Gilbert, Harvard University
  17. Philip Green, University of Washington
  18. Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology
  19. Clyde Hutchison, J. Craig Venter Institute
  20. James Kent, University of California, Santa Cruz
  21. Jonas Korlach, Pacific Biosciences
  22. Victor Ling, BC Cancer Agency, Canada
  23. David Lipman, NCBI/NLM National Instiutes of Health 
  24. James Lupski, Baylor College of Medicine
  25. Thomas Maniatis, Columbia University Medical Center
  26. W. Richard McCombie, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  27. Joachim Messing, Waksman Institute, Rutgers University
  28. Gene Myers, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology & Genetics, Germany
  29. Richard Myers, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology
  30. Debbie Nickerson, University of Washington
  31. James Ostell, NLM/NCBI
  32. Stephen Quake, Stanford University/HHMI
  33. Charles Richardson, Harvard Medical School
  34. Richard Roberts, New England BioLabs
  35. Jane Rogers, The Genome Analysis Centre, UK
  36. Mostafa Ronaghi, Illumina, Inc.
  37. Yoshiyuki Sakaki, University of Tokyo
  38. Jay Shendure, University of Washington
  39. Melvin Simon, Caltech
  40. Hamilton Smith, J. Craig Venter Institute
  41. Lloyd Smith, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  42. J. Craig Venter, J. Craig Venter Institute
  43. Robert Waterston, University of Washington
  44. James Watson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 
  45. Jean Weissenbach, Genoscope, France
  46. Barbara Wold, Caltech
  47. Huanming Yang, Beijing Genomics Institute, China
That is right.  47 speakers.  4 of which are female.  For a whopping 7.8 % female speakers.  This is one of the most extreme skews I have seen for any meeting.  This truly makes me sick to my stomach.   Since there are plenty of women who have had and still have fundamentally important roles in the field of sequencing and sequencing technology I infer that this most likely reflects some type of bias in the meeting organization and planning process.

The meeting page lists the organizers as

  • Mark Adams, J. Craig Venter Institute       
  • Nigel Brown, University of Edinburgh, UK
  • Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory     
  • Robert Waterston, University of Washington
And one of the major sponsors as Illumina.
I think they all have some explaining to do.
One last note – the meeting description says “The opening session will include a tribute to Frederick Sanger, the father of DNA sequencing, and will cover the early efforts in protein, RNA and DNA sequencing.”  Really?  The father of DNA sequencing?  Seems perfect for this meeting I guess.

UPDATE 6/29/15 7 PM PST

Apparently this meeting is part of a series on the history of molecular biology.  The meeting page says

The CSHL/Genentech Center Conferences on the History of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology (http://library.cshl.edu/hosted-meetings) aim to explore important themes of discovery in the biological sciences, bringing together scientists who made many of the seminal discoveries that began the field with others whose interests may include the current status of the field, the historical progress of the field, and/or the application of these techniques and approaches in biotechnology and medicine. Previous meetings in the series have included:  

Biotechnology: Past, Present & Future (2008)
History of Restriction Enzymes (2013)
Messenger RNA: From Discovery to Synthesis and Regulation in Bacteria and Eukaryotes (2014)
Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)

So I decided to take a peek at these meetings I started with Biotechnology: Past, Present & Future (2008).

Organizers

  1. Mila Pollock 
  2. Jan Witkowski

Advisors

  1. Sydney Brenner
  2. Peter Feinstein
  3. Lee Hood
  4. Tom Maniatis
  5. Richard Roberts 

Speakers are listed below:

  1. Garen Bohlin
  2. Robert Bud 
  3. Don Comb 
  4. Peter Feinstein
  5. Maryann Feldman 
  6. Herbert Heyneker 
  7. John H. Leamon
  8. Yuk-Lam Lo 
  9. Alan McHughen 
  10. Stelios Papadopoulos 
  11. Rich Roberts
  12. Robert Steinbrook
  13. Kenneth Thibodeau 
  14. Marc Van Montagu
  15. Charles Weissmann 
  16. Julie Xing
For speakers that comes to 14:2 male:female or 12.5 % female

Next I went to History of Restriction Enzymes (2013).

Organizers

  1. Herb Boyer, University of California, San Francisco
  2. Stu Linn, University of California, Berkeley
  3. Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  4. Richard Roberts, New England BioLabs

Speakers are listed below:

  1. Aneel Aggarwal, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
  2. Werner Arber, University of Basel, Switzerland
  3. Tom Bickle, University of Basel, Switzerland
  4. Herb Boyer, University of California, San Francisco
  5. Jack Chirikjian, Georgetown University
  6. Steve Halford, Bristol University, United Kingdom
  7. Ken Horiuchi, The Rockefeller University
  8. Clyde Hutchison, J. Craig Venter Institute
  9. Arvydas Janulaitis, Institute of Biotechnology, Lithuania
  10. Stu Linn, University of Califoria, Berkeley
  11. Bill Linton, Promega
  12. Arvydas Lubys, Institute of Biotechnology, Lithuania
  13. Matthew Meselson, Harvard University
  14. Rick Morgan, New England BioLabs
  15. Andrzej Piekarowicz, Warsaw University, Poland
  16. Alfred Pingoud, Institute of Biochemistry – Giessen, Germany
  17. Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  18. Rich Roberts, New England BioLabs
  19. John Rosenberg, University of Pittsburgh
  20. Ham Smith, J. Craig Venter Institute
  21. Bruno Strasser, Yale University & University of Geneva
  22. Geoff Wilson, New England BioLabs
OK that is 21:1 or 4.5 % women. Well, I guess this makes the meeting on sequencing look good.

Organizers:
  1. James Darnell, The Rockefeller University
  2. Adrian Krainer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  3. Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Speakers

  1. Arnold Berk, University of California, Los Angeles
  2. Douglas Black, HHMI, University of California, Los Angeles
  3. George Brawerman, Tufts University School of Medicine
  4. Sydney Brenner, Janelia Farm Research Campus, HHMI
  5. Stephen Buratowski, Harvard Medical School
  6. Louise Chow, University of Alabama
  7. Juan Pablo Couso, University of Sussex, UK
  8. James Darnell, The Rockefeller University
  9. Gideon Dreyfuss, HHMI, University of Pennsylvania
  10. Grigorii Georgiev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
  11. Adrian Krainer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  12. Tom Maniatis, Columbia University Medical Center
  13. James Manley, Columbia University
  14. Lynne Maquat, University of Rochester Medical Center
  15. Matthew Meselson, Harvard University
  16. Melissa Moore, University of Massachusetts Medical School
  17. Bernard Moss, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases
  18. Arthur Pardee, Dana Farber Cancer Institute
  19. Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
  20. Rich Roberts, New England BioLabs
  21. Robert Roeder, The Rockefeller University
  22. Mike Rosbash, Brandeis University
  23. Robert Schleif, John Hopkins University
  24. Robert Singer, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
  25. Nahum Sonenberg, McGill University, Montré, Quéc, Canada
  26. Joan Steitz, Yale University/ HHMI
  27. David Tollervey, Wellcome Center for Cell Biology; University of Edinburgh, UK
  28. Jonathan Warner, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
  29. James Watson, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

So so much better no? 24:5 Male: Female or 17% female (for the speakers).

Finally I checked out Plasmids: History & Biology (2014)

Organizers

  1. Dhruba Chattoraj, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD
  2. Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University
  3. Stanley Falkow, Stanford University
  4. Richard Novick, New York University
  5. Chris Thomas, University of Birmingham, UK
  6. Jan Witkowski, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY

Speakers

  1. Peter Barth, Helsby, Cheshire UK
  2. Susana Brom, Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México, Cuernavaca, Morelos Mexico
  3. Ananda Chakrabarty, University of Illinois
  4. Mike Chandler, Université Sabatier, Toulouse, France
  5. Dhruba Chattoraj, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD
  6. Don Clewell, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
  7. Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University
  8. Fernando de la Cruz, Universidad de Cantabria, Spain
  9. R. Curtiss III, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
  10. Julian Davies, University of British Columbia, Canada
  11. Stanley Falkow, Stanford University
  12. Laura Frost, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
  13. Barbara Funnell, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
  14. Mathias Grote, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
  15. George A. Jacoby, Lahey Clinic, Burlington, MA
  16. Mark Jones, Life Sciences Foundation, San Francisco, CA
  17. Saleem Khan, University of Pittsburgh
  18. Bruce Levin, Emory University, Atlanta, GA
  19. John Mekalanos, Harvard Medical School
  20. Marc van Montagu, Ghent University, Belgium
  21. Richard Novick, New York University
  22. David Sherratt, University of Oxford, UK
  23. David Summers, University of Cambridge, UK
  24. Chris Thomas, University of Birmingham, UK
  25. Eva Top, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
  26. Gerhart Wagner, Uppsala University, Sweden
  27. Michael Yarmolinsky, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda MD
  28. Peter Young, University of York, UK

That comes to 24:4 for speakers or 14% female.

Notice any patterns?  The totals for these meetings come to 17 women out of 142 speakers.  Or ~12 %.  That is a dismal record for Cold Spring Harbor Labs and certainly does not convince me that they are trying at all to have diversity represented at their meetings.  I note – I truly love many things about CSHL.  This is definitely not one of them.

UPDATE 2 – Some discussion of this post on Twitter

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//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js UPDATE 3: Made a Storify w/ some of the discussions

//storify.com/phylogenomics/cold-spring-harbor-history-of-science-meetings-gen/embed?border=false//storify.com/phylogenomics/cold-spring-harbor-history-of-science-meetings-gen.js?border=false[View the story “Cold Spring Harbor History of Science Meetings Gender Bias” on Storify]
——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Postdoc positions in O’Dwyer lab on theoretical ecology

Postdoctoral fellowships in theoretical ecology are available to work with PI James O’Dwyer on projects centering around the theme of "Macroecology for Microbes". Our primary goal is to develop new ecological theory to understand what drives universal behavior in large-scale, spatial and temporal patterns of taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity. A second focus of these projects will be to identify which macroecological patterns are more indicative of taxon-specific differences and ecological mechanism.

The O’Dwyer lab (http://publish.illinois.edu/odwyerlab/) at the University of Illinois is highly interdisciplinary, drawing from mathematics, physics, and bioinformatics, while the collaborative environment here at UIUC provides an opportunity for postdoctoral fellows to bridge multiple fields, across different departments and institutes. We are closely affiliated with the UIUC Program in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation (http://sib.illinois.edu/peec/) and the Institute for Genomic Biology (http://www.igb.illinois.edu/research-areas/biocomplexity).

We are seeking enthusiastic and talented individuals to join the lab, and the specific project will be determined in collaboration with the PI. We welcome candidates with training in theoretical ecology, and also in other quantitative fields. Start date is flexible, and funding is available for multiple years, contingent on satisfactory progress. To apply, send a CV, a one page statement of research interests, a representative paper, and contact information for three references to James O’Dwyer at jodwyer. Applications will be considered as they arrive, and informal inquiries are welcome.

Hoss Cartwright from Bonanza rocks the science world by joining many editorial boards

A few years ago I wrote about a brilliant and scary real world satire done by Burkhard Morgenstern:

Scary and funny: fake researcher Peter Uhnemann on OMICS group Editorial Board #JournalSPAM | The Tree of Life

Well he has done it again.  This time he has gotten a Hoss Cartwright, a fictional character from Bonanza onto the editorial board of many journals.

Here he is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Agricultural and Life Sciences
There he is listed as 

Dr. Hoss Cartwright, Senior Research Fellow, Ponderosa Institute for Bovine Research, Nevada, United States.

A little Googling found this blog post with more detail

So funny and painful at the same time.


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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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