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15 Jan 2003

Whitianga-02

The Annual New Zealand Phylogenetics Meeting

February 17 - 22, 2002

Next year's meeting will be held at New Zealand's premier beach resort of Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula. It will be summer in New Zealand, so expect temperatures in the mid-20s to 30s Celsius. There's heaps to do, lots of water sports, hiking, with some pretty good wineries and restaurants around. More information on the Coromandel website.

The meeting will be held at the Aotearoa Lodge. The Lodge has 10 rooms with twin beds and private facilities. The rate for the rooms is NZ$95 per night (if all rooms are booked). This includes GST and a continental breakfast. Email Rennie Leach with the subject "Phylogenetics Meeting" to book these rooms on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Other accommodation information can be found at the Whitianga/Mercury Bay accommodation website. Remember, this is peak season, so please book quickly. Rates for motels will be relatively high, unfortunately, but backpacker lodges and campgrounds offer cheaper accommodation.

The Aotearoa Lodge is about 1km from town (about 20 mins walk for someone like me with a dud knee!), but we will arrange transport from town to the lodge every morning for the days of the conference.

Getting to Whitianga:

If you're travelling by car, Whitianga is pretty well marked out on road maps.

If you're flying into Auckland, then you actually have the option of flying to Whitianga with Great Barrier Airlines, which operates flights to and from Auckland International Airport.

Registration:

Students NZ$50
Non-students NZ$100

The registration includes morning and afternoon teas, lunch (finger-food), boxed lunch for the free day, and a barbecue. You have to make your own arrangements for breakfast (if you are not staying at the lodge) and dinner.

Please register online and submit your presentation details as well. Payment will be taken during the conference. If you have to cancel, please let us know as soon as possible.

Preliminary programme:

Sunday, 17 Feb: 6 - 9pm, Wine and Cheese at the Aotearoa Lodge

Monday

9:10 -- Welcome
9:15 -- 9:45 Claudine Devauchelle and Alex Grossmann "Birds, crocodilians and amphibians: what do the mitochondrial genomes say?"
9:45 -- 10:15 Merel Dalebout and Scott Baker "Diversity in the depths: sexual selection and speciation in Mesoplodon beaked whales infered from nuclear and mitochondrial DNA phylogeny"
10:15 -- 10:45 Scott Baker et al. "www.DNA-surveillance: molecular taxonomy for species identification and discovery"
10:45 -- 11:30 Morning Tea
11:30 -- 12:00 Matthew Phillips "Phylogenetic bias among morphological data"
12:00 -- 12:30 Daniel Faith "Further towards an inclusive philosophy: a response to my critics"
12:30 -- 2:00 Lunch
2:00 -- 2:30 Rissa Ota on triplet Markov (title TBA)
2:30 -- 3:00 Mike Hendy "Cubic order heuristics for parsimonious phylogenies"
3:00 -- 3:45 Afternoon Tea
3:45 -- 4:15 David Penny et al "The shortest possible tree for large datasets"
4:15 -- 4:45 Benny Chor and Sagi Snir "Four taxon ML fork under molecular clock: analytic solutions"

Tuesday

9:15 -- 9:45 Mike Steel "Generalised directed characters: overcoming ignorance through prejudice"
9:45 -- 10:15 Charles Semple and Mike Steel "Using binary characters to infer phylogenetic trees"
10:15 -- 10:45 Allen Rodrigo "On the inconsistency of splits-graphs"
10:45 -- 11:30 Morning Tea
11:30 -- 12:00 Michael Charleston "Jungles, machetes, and savagely twisted lianas: some recent results in cophylogeny mapping"
12:00 -- 12:30 Russell Gray on language evolution (title TBA)
12:30 -- 2:00 Lunch
2:00 -- 2:30 Susan Holmes "Applications of distances in tree space"
2:30 -- 3:00 David Epstein "Metrics on the space of trees and consensus trees"
3:00 -- 3:45 Afternoon Tea
3:45 -- 4:15 Peter Lockhart and Anthony Larkum "Ancient divergences: phylogeny or the pattern of functional constraint"
4:15 -- 4:45 Lindell Bromham "Hox genes, the Cambrian explosion and body plan evolution"

Wednesday, 20 Feb: 6 - 9pm, Barbecue at the Aotearoa Lodge

Thursday

9:15 -- 9:45 Anthony Larkum "Refining the SSU rRNA-based model for plastid origins"
9:45 -- 10:15 Paul Gardner "Optimality in an RNA world"
10:15 -- 10:45 Nicoleen Cloete "Stochastic processes in the development of a genealogy"
10:45 -- 11:30 Morning Tea
11:30 -- 12:00 Howard Ross and Allen Rodrigo "Positive selection drives HIV-1 molecular variation and covaries with the length of disease"
12:00 -- 12:30 Peter Meintjes et al. "Changes in HIV-1 codon usage during infection"
12:30 -- 2:00 Lunch
2:00 -- 2:30 Peter Waddell et al. "Resolving the tree of placental mammals: the superiority of a statistical SINE approach and the non-robustness of Bayesian approaches"
2:30 -- 3:00 Alexei Drummond et al. "Bayesian evolutionary inference and measurably evolving populations"
3:00 -- 3:45 Afternoon Tea
3:45 -- 4:15 Geoff Nicholls et al. "Ancestral sequences"
4:15 -- 4:45 Elchanan Mossel "Phase transitions and phylogeny"

Friday

9:15 -- 9:45 Robert Freckleton "Ecology and evolution of life histories: some problems and current methodology"
9:45 -- 10:15 Hamish Keston and Allen Rodrigo "A comparison of the phylogenetic bootstrap and jackknife"
10:15 -- 11:00 Morning Tea
11:00 -- 11:30 Abby Harrison (title TBA)
11:30 -- 12:00 Alex Grossmann "Mitochondrial phylogenies"

For more information, or if you have queries, please email Allen Rodrigo.