Save the Date! The 2026 conference will be June 1-5, 2026, at The Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics.
Modeling & Theory in Population Biology at the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology
Our latest conference was June 2nd - 6th 2025 at the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology in Chicago.
More details can be found on the NITMB website. The full schedule is below.
Monday, June 2 |
|
|---|---|
| 8:30 am - 8:55 am | Light breakfast |
| 8:55 am - 9:00 am | Welcome, Introduction of the Institute & Housekeeping – NITMB Leadership |
| 9:00 am - 09:10 am |
Workshop Introduction - Joanna Masel |
| 9:10 am - 9:20 am | Noah Rosenberg - SMTPB information |
| 9:20 am - 9:40 am | Nick Barton - Modelling complex traits |
| 9:40 am - 10:00 am | Dandan Peng - Population Genetics Simulations on Phylogenetic Trees: Investigating the Relationship Between Micro and Macro Evolution |
| 10:00 am - 10:20 am | Jason Bertram - Strong amplification of quantitative genetic variation under a balance between mutation and fluctuating stabilizing selection |
| 10:20 am - 10:50 am | Coffee Break |
| 10:50 am - 11:10 am | Junjian (Janis) Liu - Error rates in QST-FST comparisons depend on genetic architecture and estimation procedure |
| 11:10 am - 11:30 am | Walid Mawass - Residual confounding bias due to imperfect population stratification control |
| 11:30 am - 11:50 am | Mariadaria Ianni-Ravn - Understanding the Impacts of Multi-Generational Environment Sharing on Phenotypic Covariance |
| 11:50 am - 1:00 pm | Lunch |
| 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm |
Parallel Discussion Sessions: 1. Rate-dependent phenomena in ecology and evolution |
| 2:15 pm - 2:45 pm | Coffee Break |
| 2:45 pm - 4:00 pm |
Parallel Discussion Sessions: 2. An Introduction to Branching Processes and Generating Functions 3. Causal Inference in Population Biology 4. Which parts of population genetic theory need to be rethought in light of realistically high genome-wide deleterious mutation rates in species like humans? 5. Imagining the next generation of social evolution theory 6. SMTPB: Strategies for advocating for modeling to non-theorists 7. Matrix population models and linkages to population genetics, quantitative models, and evolutionary theory. 8. Theory to Control, Mitigate, and Anticipate Infectious Disease Impact |
| 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm | Poster session and drinks |
| Tuesday, June 3 |
|
|---|---|
| 8:30 am - 8:55 am | Light breakfast |
| 8:55 am - 9:00 am | Welcome & Housekeeping |
| 9:00 am - 09:30 am |
Anuraag Bukkuri - Williamson Prize talk: Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics as an Engine for Cancer Treatment and Drug Discovery |
| 9:30 am - 9:50 am | Motasem ElGamel - Population dynamics and universal statistics of tumor-inhabiting bacteria |
| 9:50 am - 10:10 am | Nicola Mulberry - Can we build lineage trees from single-cell level gene expression data? |
| 10:10 am - 10:30 am | Murat Tugrul - Noise in Cellular Damage Accumulation: Consequences for Ageing and Population Fitness |
| 10:30 am - 11:00 am | Coffee Break |
| 11:00 am - 11:20 am | Aaron King - Markov genealogy processes: a new mathematical basis for phylodynamics |
| 11:20 am - 11:40 am | Gili Greenbaum - Ecology and evolution in gene drive modeling |
| 11:40 am - 12:00 pm | Hildegard Uecker - Modeling evolutionary rescue: Concepts and applications to bacterial evolution |
| 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Lunch |
| 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm |
Parallel Discussion Sessions: 1. Mathematics and Bureaucracy2. SMTPB: Undergraduate teaching on modeling & theory 3. Modeling polygenic inheritance with loci of different effect sizes 4. New opportunities in phylodynamics 5. What is an environment? Phenotypes and fitness mapping across environmental scales in the era of cheap fitness measurements 6. Statistics for diversity measurement across population biology 7. Incorporating ecology and evolution into models 8. Establishment probabilities of beneficial alleles when the branching process assumption fails |
| 2:15 pm - 2:45 pm |
Parallel Discussion Sessions: Coffee Break |
| 2:45 pm - 4:00 pm | Parallel Discussion Sessions: 1. Mathematics and Bureaucracy2. SMTPB: Undergraduate teaching on modeling & theory 3. Modeling polygenic inheritance with loci of different effect sizes 4. New opportunities in phylodynamics 5. What is an environment? Phenotypes and fitness mapping across environmental scales in the era of cheap fitness measurements 6. Statistics for diversity measurement across population biology 7. Incorporating ecology and evolution into models 8. Establishment probabilities of beneficial alleles when the branching process assumption fails |
| 4:15 pm - 6:00 pm |
Poster session and drinks |
Wednesday, June 4 | |
|---|---|
8:30 am - 8:55 am | Light breakfast |
| 8:55 am - 9:00 am | Welcome & Housekeeping |
| 9:00 am - 09:20 am | Talia Borofsky - Cooperative hunting and competition for prey shape group formation |
| 9:20 am - 9:40 am | Lilach Hadany - The evolution of cooperation under host-microbiome interactions |
| 9:40 am - 10:00 am | Daniel Priego Espinosa - The effect of background selection on the evolution of altruism in metapopulations |
| 10:00 am - 10:20 am | Farshad Shirani - Evolution of a Species' Range |
| 10:20 am - 10:50 am | Coffee Break |
| 10:50 am - 11:00 am | Sebastian Schreiber - Priority effects in community assembly: Mathematical rigor meets empirical realism |
| 11:10 am - 11:30 am | Zhijie Feng - A linear response theory of ecological invasion |
| 11:30 am - 11:50 am | Fernanda Valdovinos - A bioenergetic framework for aboveground terrestrial food webs |
| 11:50 am - 1:00 pm | Lunch |
| 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm | Parallel Discussion Sessions: 1. SMTPB: Online events & future meetings2. Enhancing Communication and Understanding of Theoretical Models in Population Biology through Dynamic Visualizations 3. Accounting for unequal variance in mixed-ploidy population genetics 4. Modeling the evolution of recombination landscapes 5. Multiplicative noise in ecological dynamics 6. The informativeness of alleles for mixed-membership cluster assignment 7. Adaptation in spatially and temporally varying environments 8. Scale-independent, rank-statistic based definition of epistasis |
| 2:15 pm - 2:45 pm | Coffee Break |
| 2:45 pm - 4:00 pm |
Parallel Discussion Sessions: generated from sticky note board |
| 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm | Excursion - river boat architecture cruise |
| 8:30 am - 8:55 am | Light breakfast |
| 8:55 am - 9:00 am | Welcome & Housekeeping |
| 9:00 am - 09:20 am | John Wakeley - Coalescent processes conditional on the population pedigree when there is selfing |
| 9:20 am - 9:40 am | Diego Veliz-Otani - Genetic Relationship Matrices calculated from whole-genome sequence data can capture evolutionary relationships at all time scales |
| 9:40 am - 10:00 am | Daniel Weissman - The time to the most recent genetic common ancestor |
| 10:00 am - 10:20 am | Hao Shen - Efficient computation of expected pairwise coalescent times in the structured coalescent |
| 10:20 am - 10:50 am | Coffee Break |
| 10:50 am - 11:10 am | Lily Tamir - Combinatorics of time-consistent galled trees |
| 11:10 am - 11:30 am | Jaehee Kim - Population genetics of dormancy |
| 11:30 am - 11:50 am | John McEnany - Rapid evolution in a fluctuating environment |
| 11:50 am - 1:00 pm | Lunch |
| 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm | Parallel Discussion Sessions: generated from sticky note board |
| 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm | Coffee Break |
| 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm |
Parallel Discussion Sessions: generated from sticky note board |
| 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm | Reception with drinks and appetizers (in-suite) |
| 8:30 am - 8:55 am | Light breakfast |
| 8:55 am - 9:00 am | Welcome & Housekeeping |
| 9:00 am - 09:20 am | Anastasia (Nastia) Lyulina - The site-frequency spectrum under selection and time-varying demography |
| 9:20 am - 9:40 am | Jiawei Liu - MultiSEED: a Theoretical Framework to Predict the Long-term Strain Diversity |
| 9:40 am - 10:00 am | Puneeth Deraje - The Brownian bridge and its extensions: Applications to spatial inference, phylogenetics and population genetics |
| 10:00 am - 10:20 am | Florian Labourel - Beta-binomial distributions and the population genetics view of systems biology |
| 10:20 am - 10:50 am | Coffee Break |
| 10:50 am - 11:10 am | Jhelam Nitin Deshpande - Pleiotropic trajectories of evolution when there is global epistasis |
| 11:10 am - 11:30 am | Claire Godineau - How Inbreeding Depression in Growth Shapes Competition and Fitness: Insights from a New Ecological Model |
| 11:30 am - 11:50 am | Bret Payseur - Elevated mutation near crossovers inhibits the evolution of recombination |
| 11:50 am - 12:00 pm | Noah Rosenberg - Talk and poster prize announcements |
| 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm | Lunch |
Modeling & Theory in Population Biology at the Banff International Research Station
May 20, 2024 - May 24, 2024
The society hosted a hybrid research meeting with a small in-person component at the Banff International Research Station. A summary of the event by participants Gili Greenbaum and Oana Carja has been published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and can be read here.
The full report of the meeting can be read on the BIRS website here.
Schedule:
| Monday, May 20 | |
|---|---|
| 07:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 08:45 - 09:00 | Introduction and Welcome by BIRS Staff ↓ (TCPL 201) |
| 09:00 - 09:45 | Noah Rosenberg: Introduction to the meeting; participant introductions (in-person participants) (TCPL 201) |
| 09:45 - 10:10 | Ailene MacPherson: A call for Bayesian inference in local adaptation: what we can and can not learn from reciprocal transplant data [SESSION TITLE: SPATIAL MODELS] (TCPL 201) |
| 10:10 - 10:40 | Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
| 10:40 - 11:05 | Daniel Weissman: Challenges for selective sweep inference in spatially structured populations (TCPL 201) |
| 11:05 - 11:30 | Oana Carja: Topological puzzles in biology: how structure shapes a system's evolution (TCPL 201) |
| 11:30 - 13:00 | Lunch ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 13:00 - 13:25 | Mark Broom: Biological modelling: some average research [SESSION TITLE: POPULATION MODELS, GENERAL PRINCIPLES] (TCPL 201) |
| 13:25 - 13:50 | Brandon Ogbunu: On biological laws (TCPL 201) |
| 13:50 - 14:10 | Group Photo ↓ (TCPL Foyer) |
| 14:10 - 14:35 | Caroline Colijn: A theory, not just a theory, or not even a theory? Strengths and pitfalls of quantitative modelling (TCPL 201) |
| 14:35 - 15:00 | Hamish Spencer: Flavors of history in population modelling (TCPL 201) |
| 15:00 - 15:30 | Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
| 15:30 - 16:00 | SMTPB large-group discussion (TCPL 201) |
| 16:00 - 17:30 | SMTPB workgroups (in-person participants) (TCPL Foyer) |
| 17:30 - 19:30 | Dinner ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| Tuesday, May 21 | |
|---|---|
| 07:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 09:00 - 09:25 | Marcy Uyenoyama: Effect of genetic diversity on FST and LD (TCPL 201) |
| 09:25 - 09:50 | Emilia Huerta-Sanchez: Detecting introgression from multiple archaic populations (TCPL 201) |
| 09:50 - 10:15 | Matthew Osmond: Locating genetic ancestors with ancestral recombination graphs (TCPL 201) |
| 10:35 - 11:20 | Coffee Break (online coffee break together with CIRM) (TCPL Foyer) |
| 11:10 - 11:35 | Jeremy Van Cleve: Too big to (not) fail: scale, size, & critical transitions in social groups (TCPL 201) |
| 11:45 - 13:00 | Lunch ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 13:00 - 13:25 | Sasha Dall: The evolutionary consequences of learning under competition [SESSION TITLE: COMPETITION, COOPERATION & CONFLICT] (TCPL 201) |
| 13:25 - 13:45 | Egor Lappo: Cultural evolution modeling of move choice in chess (TCPL 201) |
| 13:45 - 14:10 | Joanna Masel: Fitness: how to get rid of it (TCPL 201) |
| 14:10 - 14:30 | Daniel Smith: A unified framework for interference and exploitative competition: synthesizing classic ecological and evolutionary game theory models (TCPL 201) |
| 14:30 - 14:55 | Benjamin Allen: Nonlinear social evolution and the emergence of collective action (TCPL 201) |
| 15:00 - 15:30 | Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
| 15:55 - 16:45 | SMTPB large-group discussion (in-person participants) (TCPL 201) |
| 16:45 - 17:30 | SMTPB workgroups (in-person participants) (TCPL Foyer) |
| 17:30 - 19:30 | Dinner ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| Wednesday, May 22 | |
|---|---|
| 07:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 09:00 - 09:25 | Julia Palacios: Distance-based modeling and inference in phylogenetics [SESSION TITLE: PHYLOGENY, TREES, AND MACROEVOLUTION] (TCPL 201) |
| 09:25 - 09:50 | Noah Rosenberg: Enumeration in mathematical phylogenetics: we are not afraid (TCPL 201) |
| 09:50 - 10:10 | Chloe Shiff: Enumeration of rooted binary perfect phylogenies (TCPL 201) |
| 10:10 - 10:30 | Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
| 10:30 - 10:55 | Lindi Wahl: Are high rates of bacterial extinction over geological time scales due to phage evolution? (TCPL 201) |
| 10:55 - 11:20 | Carolin Kosiol: PoMo via RevBayes: inferring phylogenies, disentangling GC-bias and balancing selection (TCPL 201) |
| 11:20 - 11:45 | Benjamin Peter: Interpreting principal components analysis (TCPL 201) |
| 11:45 - 13:00 | Lunch ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 13:30 - 17:30 | Free Afternoon (Banff National Park) |
| 17:30 - 19:30 | Dinner ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| Thursday, May 23 | |
|---|---|
| 07:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 09:00 - 09:25 | Troy Day: Modeling the distribution of fitness effects of new mutations [SESSION TITLE: SELECTION AND ADAPTATION] (TCPL 201) |
| 09:25 - 09:50 | Yoav Ram: Fast adaption can be an evolutionary diversion (TCPL 201) |
| 09:50 - 10:10 | Puneeth Deraje: The role of epigenetics in evolutionary rescue (TCPL 201) |
| 10:10 - 10:30 | Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
| 10:30 - 10:55 | Andrew Clark: Modeling piRNA defense against transposable elements (Online) |
| 10:55 - 11:20 | Carl Bergstrom: The cost of acquiring information by natural selection (TCPL 201) |
| 11:20 - 11:45 | Daniel Weinreich: Modifier Theory: The Population Genetics of Phenotypic Noise (TCPL 201) |
| 11:45 - 13:00 | Lunch ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 13:10 - 13:35 | Gili Greenbaum: Eco-evolutionary modeling of gene drives [SESSION TITLE: ECOLOGY/EVOLUTION INTERFACE] (TCPL 201) |
| 13:35 - 13:55 | Maike Morrison: Quantifying the stability of microbiomes and the timescale of antibiotic perturbation (TCPL 201) |
| 13:55 - 14:20 | Viggo Andreasen: The effect of susceptible depletion on fitness and natural selection during the covid-pandemic (TCPL 201) |
| 14:20 - 14:45 | Rohan Mehta: Eco-evolutionary dynamics of costly antipredator behavior: autotomy and offspring burden (TCPL 201) |
| 14:45 - 15:10 | Bryn Wiley: On the fast track: hybrids adapt more rapidly than parental populations in a novel environment (TCPL 201) |
| 14:55 - 15:30 | Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
| 15:40 - 16:05 | Mark Tanaka: Why is facultative parthenogenesis uncommon? [SESSION TITLE: MODES OF REPRODUCTION] (TCPL 201) |
| 16:05 - 16:30 | Sally Otto: Evolution when selection occurs in both haploid and diploid phases (TCPL 201) |
| 16:20 - 16:55 | SMTPB workgroups (in-person participants) (TCPL Foyer) |
| 16:55 - 17:30 | SMTPB large-group discussion (in-person participants) (TCPL 201) |
| 17:30 - 19:30 | Dinner ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| Friday, May 24 | |
|---|---|
| 07:00 - 08:45 | Breakfast ↓ (Vistas Dining Room) |
| 09:00 - 09:20 | Amy Forsythe: A small change can make a big difference: capturing vital rate heterogeneity in Leslie matrices [SESSION TITLE: DEMOGRAPHY AND STAGE STRUCTURE] (TCPL 201) |
| 09:20 - 09:45 | Maria Orive: Evolutionary rescue and spatial adaptation under sexual and asexual reproduction: combining stage-structured models and quantitative phenotypes (TCPL 201) |
| 09:45 - 10:10 | Ulrich Steiner: Scaling stochastic molecular dynamics to demographic change in structured populations (TCPL 201) |
| 10:10 - 10:30 | Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
| 10:30 - 11:00 | Checkout by 11AM ↓ (Front Desk - Professional Development Centre) |
| 10:30 - 10:55 | Oren Kolodny: Modeling cultural and demographic interactions among prehistoric populations [SESSION TITLE: CULTURAL AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION] (TCPL 201) |
| 10:55 - 11:15 | Kaleda Denton: Modelling Constant and Stochastically Variable Conformity (TCPL 201) |
| 11:15 - 11:40 | Nicole Creanza: Theoretical approaches to understanding cultural change in birds and humans (TCPL 201) |
| 11:40 - 13:30 | Lunch from 11:30 to 13:30 (Vistas Dining Room) |