Uncommon Ground

Monthly Archive: December 2016

Catching up over the holidays

It’s been a busy few weeks since my last post (November 30). I was in Bonn when that post appeared for a meeting at the Crop Trust focused on developing metrics to assess whether global genebanks have the right types and amounts of diversity to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, specifically to meet this target under Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

By 2020, maintain the genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants and farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed and diversified seed and plant banks at the national, regional and international levels, and promote access to and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, as internationally agreed.

Almost immediately after I returned, I left for Washington, DC and the annual meetings of the Council of Graduate Schools. When I returned, many items requiring attention had accumulated, and some unusually challenging end-of-the-semester student issues emerged. That’s a long way of saying it’s been nearly a month since my last post. I hope to begin posting regularly again. We’ll see if I manage to do it.

I will be busy this spring, too. In addition to my duties as Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of The Graduate School, I’ll be teaching my graduate course in population genetics, EEB 5348. I just started rebuilding the course website after losing it due to a server meltdown last summer. I’ll have notes for individual lectures on-line again in the next week or two. In the meantime, a compiled version of all of the notes is available on Figshare. If you’re a LaTeX geek, a more current version of the notes (in LaTeX, with EPS graphics) is available on Github.