BioSynC Attends Annual Joint Meeting on Evolution
Alta Buden
From June 20-24th BioSynC staff members Mark Westneat, Audrey Aronowsky, Darolyn Striley and myself hosted a booth at the 2008 Evolution meeting. The meeting attracts leading phylogeneticists, systematists, and evolutionary biologists from around the world making it an ideal conference to recruit scientists to EOL and also to solicit interest in synthesis meetings. It was held in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota and had an attendence of about a thousand people. Our booth got lots of attention (we were only ones with candy 
) and we met several people who are going to propose synthesis meetings. Our booth was across from the NEScent booth and we had alot of fun getting to know our fellow synthesis meeting organizers, who, for the record are still leaps ahead of us in terms of booth set-up.
Mark gave a 15 minute talk to a full audience titled: “Phylogenetic visualization tools and phyloinformatics in the Encyclopedia of Life”. In the presentation, Mark used his own fish research ( a phylogenetic dataset) which incorporates systematics, developmental genomics, and biogeography to demonstrate the many kinds of data that EOL will be able to handle and also how the research communities that focus on each of these kids of data could work together using EOL. Here are some pictures of us and the booth in action:
