Bodega Phylogenetics Workshop

I have finished day one of the Bodega Phylogenetics Workshop and am not disappointed.  The first day of lectures started with John Huelsenbeck covering continous-time markov models as well as a little about Bayesian inference and some ideas about biogeography.  This was followed by a super quick crash course in model selection, Mr Bayes and some thoughts on model adequacy by Jeremy Brown.  After dinner we went back to the lecture hall and listened to Bruce Rannala who discussed history and data size issues in resolving large phylogenetic trees.   Between those lectures we had a coffee breaks and 2 meals where all of the faculty mentioned plus many others were available to discuss our ideas and thoughts.

After breakfast this morning we have divergence time estimation with Beast by Tracy Heath.  Then we have species tree estimation and *Beast with Bob Thompson.  Tonight we will have next generation sequencing technology with Johnathan Eisen.   One interesting part of this workshop is the student presentations.  So on Friday we have to get up and give presentations of something that we have done while we have been here at Bodega.  Finding the right size of project is difficult.  You don’t want it to be trivial but at the same time Friday is not very far away….