North American Workshop in Cladistic Methods, 2008

The Ohio State University, with generous financial support from the Willi Hennig Society, will conduct a workshop on phylogenetic methods in Columbus, Ohio, July 21-26, 2008. The purpose is to provide further instruction and experience to students who already have some familiarity with phylogenetic analysis. The format is a series of lectures and laboratory sessions that will give students the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the logic of the phylogenetic method, parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches, tree search strategies, measures of support, DNA alignment, morphological character coding, weighting, analysis of multiple and large data sets, consensus and character hypothesis testing.

Lecturers are expected to include

• James M. Carpenter (Growth of modern systematics, Coding morphological characters),
  
• James S. Farris (Political history of phylogenetics),
  
• Pablo A. Goloboff (Optimization, Tree search, Consensus methods, Clade support, Large data sets, Weighting),
  
• Mari Källersjö (Alignment and subsequent analysis of molecular data),
  
• Laura S. Kubatko (Logic and operation of Likelihood and Bayesian approaches),
  
• John W. Wenzel (Nontraditional characters, Diagnosing problematic results), and
  
• Ward C. Wheeler (Dynamic optimization).
  

The software used for the course will include TNT, POY, RaxML, MrBayes (all distributed with the course packet) and Clustal.
Further information may be obtained at the workshop website