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Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to let you know about a workshop and symposium that we will hold on May 20-22, 2012, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The workshop will provide training in advanced methods for multiple sequence alignment and phylogeny estimation, and will take place on May 20 and 21; the symposium will follow immediately and will feature research presentations on the same topic. This workshop is funded by:

US NSF DEB 0733029
Large-scale simultaneous multiple alignment and phylogeny estimation
Project Webpage: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/tandy/ATOL-MSA.html

The workshop will include presentations of new methods for maximum likelihood phylogeny estimation of large sequence alignments (including GARLI and FastTree), for comparing different alignments of the same dataset, for phylogenetic analyses of datasets that include partial sequences (e.g., short reads generated in a metagenomic analysis), for supertree estimation, and for simulating sequence evolution. However, a main focus is to train participants in both basic and advanced use of the SATé software (Liu et al. 2009, Science, Vol. 324, no. 5934, pp. 1561-1564) for simultaneous estimation of alignments and trees -- software available for download at:
"https://phylo.bio.ku.edu/software/sate/sate.html

Workshop participants are expected to bring laptops with them to the workshop, so that they can perform alignment and phylogenetic tree estimations. We will provide test datasets for you to learn how to use SATé, but strongly encourage you to bring your own datasets to analyze.

Attendance at the workshop is limited to 40 participants, and registration is required. If you are interested in attending the workshop, whether or not you are requesting travel support, please fill out the Word document available at

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/tandy/workshop-application.doc ,

and return it to Laurie Alvarez ( lauriea@austin.utexas.edu ) by February 15, 2012. We will respond to requests for registration by March 1, 2012.

For more information on the workshop, please contact me (Tandy Warnow), at tandy@cs.utexas.edu . For more information on the Symposium, please contact Mike Braun ( braunm@si.edu ). We look forward to seeing you at the Smithsonian workshop and symposium!

Regards,
Tandy Warnow and Mike Braun
On behalf of the AToL project team:

Michael Braun, The Smithsonian Institution
Mark Holder, The University of Kansas
Jim Leebens-Mack, The University of Georgia
Randy Linder, The University of Texas
Etsuko Moriyama, The University of Nebraska
Tandy Warnow, The University of Texas