Fall 2024 Newsletter

Q4 (Fall) Newsletter

23.12.2024 by Charlyne Bürki

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Welcome to our Fall 2024 newsletter. We've been busy! Find out what we've been up to!

Special Events

All the symposiums, conferences, milestones, and events that we've attended at a glance!

Fall 2024 was busy for the group! Members attended multiple conferences between Germany and the UK, Tim and Tanja with the help of James, Marcus, Nicola and Charlyne taught the semester course Computational Biology navigating between the ETH campus in Zürich and our campus in Basel.

We had the pleasure of attending multiple award ceremonies (see below) celebrating the successes of our group members, and we finished off our busy year with a group gift exchange before the holidays. 2024 was a busy year, and we're looking forward to the upcoming one.

For upcoming 2025 newsletters, you can look forward to more content concerning our visitors and more. In the meantime, if you would like to see some new content, let us know. Feel free to contact us with your suggestions.

Take a look at what happened this Fall!

Between November 6th-8th, Tanja, Noémie, Chaoran, Charlyne, and Louis attended Virus Genomics, Evolution and Bioinformatics (VGEB) at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK. Tanja gave a keynote talk, entitled Leveraging pathogen sequencing and statistical analysis to inform public health - past, present and future available external page here. Noémie gave a talk entitled Agnostic identification of pathogen lineages and estimation of fitness dynamics, presenting the software external page Phylowave she developed previously. Chaoran presented two posters: GenSpectrum: from rapid data queries to customizable dashboards and Loculus: an open-source software for managing and sharing pathogen sequencing data. Both presented software available external page here and external page here. Finally, Charlyne presented a poster: Genomic diversity of co-circulating respiratory pathogens – from sequencing, statistical analysis to an interactive dashboard which presented a dashboard available external page here.

On November 8th/9th, Robert and Bethany attended the Swiss Geoscience Meeting 2024 here in Basel where Bethany presented a poster and Robert gave a talk on his shrew research. In December, they travelled to Erlangen, Germany to attend PalAss where Robert presented a poster on punctuated evolution modeled in pinguins and Bethany gave a symposium talk. They both helped the BEAST2 workshop.

Sheena participated in fieldwork in Belize as part of the MICS7 (Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey) water quality module, hosted by UNICEF Belize and coordinated by the Statistical Institute of Belize. This household survey focused on understanding drinking water quality and safety.

Highlighted images from our activities

The infamous dice 🎲 to duel for gifts
The assortment of gifts and food at our Christmas gift exchange
Tanja presenting the group's activities at VGEB 2024

Papers we've published

Good news! These are some of the papers that we've worked on. Congratulations to all the authors!

We've said goodbye to ...

Mara Neacsu is leaving us at the end of December 2024. She worked on the analysis of bacterial reads detected in ReVSeq samples, and later, on the automatization of various bacterial assembly pipelines. She is planning to do a 4-month internship in machine learning, and then start her PhD.

Bethany Allen is leaving us at the end of 2024, after a little more than 3 years. During her time in cEvo, Bethany investigated the patterns and drivers of speciation and extinction on geological timescales. She was also a part of the BECCY project (Biodiversity, Earth, Climate Coupling in Yunnan, China), funded by an ETH+ grant, where she used Bayesian phylodynamics in combination with fossil data to investigate controls on plant diversification in the Hengduan mountains during the Cenozoic. In 2025, Bethany will start a postdoc at the University of Potsdam in the external page Geosciences Institute.

Awards, Prizes & Grants

These are a recap of the awards, grants, and prizes that we've received or have been nominated. Read on to find out more details!

ALEA award runner-up for Tanja: On November 26th, 2204 The whole cEvo group was invited to the award ceremony of the ALEA award. This award recognizes important leaders in ETH Zürich for their thoughtful work with their groups and collaborators. The nominees are nominated by their group members. We all enjoyed a wonderful night of inspirational leaders. Thanks to the organizers!

Pathoplexus logo

National Prize for Open Research Data for Pathoplexus: On November 27th The Pathoplexus association, that several cEvo members have co-founded, has been awarded with the Swiss national ORD prize for its innovative approach to facilitate open sharing of pathogen genome sequencing data. You can read more external page here.

Sir Kenneth Mather Memorial Prize for Noémie: Noémie was awarded this prize by the UK Genetics Society for her PhD work on the global dynamics of the bacterium behind whooping cough, using genomes from throughout Europe and the world. You can read more external page here.

Karl-Heinz Hoffmann Prize by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities for Tanja: Tanja was awarded this prize for herr work in the field of computational phylogenetics and related fields in order to decode genomic data from pathogens, cells and also species on different time scales, recognizing her leadership at in this field. You can read more external page here.