International scientists at UF this week for epidemiology workshop

August 28, 2013

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A workshop on virus evolution and molecular epidemiology is being held this week at the Hilton University of Florida Conference Center, hosted by UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.

The workshop will train 90 scientists, including graduate students, postdoctoral students, junior and senior faculties, from 41 countries, including several African and Asian countries. They represent a broad range of cultural and scientific backgrounds with research themes focused on the impact of emerging viral and bacterial infections in the global world and the novel DNA analyses techniques that can be used to study emerging epidemics.

This is an annual meeting organized since 1995 to train students and scientists in the latest developments of computational biology and genomic data analysis applied to the study of viral infections. Over the past 15 years, the VEME workshop has become internationally recognized as one of the leading bioinformatics training programs in the field of phylogenetic and population genetic analysis of viral sequence data.

Since 2003, the workshop has been hosted by prestigious universities and institutes worldwide, including Stanford University, the Finnish National Public Health Institute in Helsinki and Johns Hopkins University, among others.

The workshop was redesigned to include lectures on the analysis of viral, parasite, bacterial and fungal genomic data.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Marco Salemi, associate professor at UF’s department of pathology and Dr. Anne-Mieke Vandamme, professor of molecular evolution at the Catholic University Leuven Belgium, under the sponsorship of the UF Office of Research, Emerging Pathogens Institute, UF Genetics Institute and UF-COM department of pathology, immunology and laboratory medicine.

For more information, go to http://regaweb.med.kuleuven.be/veme-workshop/2013/.