Our graduate-level course "Fundamentals of Population Genetics for Conservation and Ecology" was a wonderful 4 days workshop!
The course tool place in Tel Aviv University and included graduate students, postdocs and faculty from universities across Israel and from abroad. Led by Dr. Gili Greenbaum, myself and Dr. Roi Dor, with guest lectures by Prof. Marc Feldman and Dr. Naama Kopelman, the course was targeted towards graduate students and other researchers practicing applying genetics in conservation and wildlife-ecology, as well as other relevant disciplines.
The goal was to provide an introduction to the basic ideas and concepts of theoretical population genetics, focusing on topics that are useful for understanding today’s commonly-used methodologies in ecological genetics. During the course, we surveyed the fundamentals of evolutionary processes in populations and address the theory relevant to commonly used methodologies, such as genetic diversity analysis, effective size estimation, population structure inference, and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). We referred to commonly-used software and elaborate on the theoretical foundations underlying each of these.
With a wonderful first cohort, we hope to establish this tradition and teach this course once again in 2021.