Conference Description
The Microbial Population Biology GRC is a premier, international scientific conference focused on advancing the frontiers of science through the presentation of cutting-edge and unpublished research, prioritizing time for discussion after each talk and fostering informal interactions among scientists of all career stages. The conference program includes a diverse range of speakers and discussion leaders from institutions and organizations worldwide, concentrating on the latest developments in the field. The conference is five days long and held in a remote location to increase the sense of camaraderie and create scientific communities, with lasting collaborations and friendships. In addition to premier talks, the conference has designated time for poster sessions from individuals of all career stages, and afternoon free time and communal meals allow for informal networking opportunities with leaders in the field.
Natural communities of microbes are highly diverse, containing an incredible variety of genotypes and species. Despite the important functional roles of microbial diversity in the environment and in association with eukaryotic hosts, microbiologists struggle to provide a convincing mechanistic account for how diversity evolves and is maintained. Explanations have generally been sought from either end of a spectrum of complexity. At one extreme, ‘top-down’ approaches seek to describe the full taxonomic and functional diversity of microbial communities in nature while, at the other extreme, ‘bottom-up’ approaches use evolution experiments to track the origins and fate of diversity in highly simplified, defined laboratory environments. The middle ground remains under-explored, so that we cannot be certain that the mechanisms governing the origins and maintenance of diversity in test tubes are sufficient to explain the patterns of variation observed in natural communities. Our conference will address this knowledge gap directly by bringing together leading researchers working at the interface of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to provide a more complete understanding of microbial diversity. We will recruit speakers who capitalize on technological advances in fields from chemistry to data science to investigate the mechanisms that drive microbial dynamics, at every scale, from the molecules microbes use to interact with other microbes and with their eukaryotic hosts to the communities microbes form that affect the health of their host or environment.
The conference chair is currently developing their preliminary program, which will include 9 sessions and the names of the invited speakers and discussion leaders for each of these sessions. Please check back regularly for updates to this information.