Présentation
Each year, we co-organize the “Mathematical and Computational Evolutionary Biology conference”, with colleagues from Montpellier.
The theme of this year’s edition will be “Forecasting evolution“: while most analyses are designed to reconstruct the past in order to understand evolution, our modern society is in dire need of anticipating the future using sound scientific approaches. This is particularly true in the context of global warming and more generally global changes. New approaches that model future evolution are emerging, for example to predict epidemics, evolution of cancer, shifts in species/population distributions or species loss. Evolutionary biology is thus widening its focus, trying to predict future biological states and better define the range of applicability of these predictions. Making progress in this new research area will involve cross-disciplinary approaches, accurate statistical methods, and powerful computational techniques.
Beyond this year’s theme, general concepts, models, methods and algorithms will be presented and discussed, just as in the previous editions of MCEB. As usual, the meeting will bring together researchers originating from various disciplines: mathematics, computer science, phylogenetics, population genetics, epidemiology, ecological modeling … Keynote speakers will introduce a field of research and discuss their own work in this field (see below). Afternoon will be for short presentations and posters, with plenty of time for discussions. We will stop early every day, thus leaving time for other activities, such as hiking or swimming. The number of attendees will be limited to favor small group interactions.