Preparing for EEB 5348, Population Genetics, Spring 2019 @UConn

Yes, I know that it’s early September and that my first lecture in Population Genetics isn’t scheduled until 22 January 2019 (140 days from now), but I’m starting preparations early this year for several reasons.

  1. Because of my responsibilities as Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of The Graduate School, I don’t have a lot of time during the week to spend on revising lectures or on finding datasets for projects and making sure the projects can be finished in a reasonable amount of time. By starting now, I hope to be far enough ahead of the game by the time Spring Semester arrives that I don’t have to kill myself keeping up.
  2. I’m significantly expanding my treatment of population genomics. In Spring 2017 I devoted only one lecture to it. It deserved more than one lecture then, and it certainly deserves more than one lecture now. If you look at the lecture schedule as it stands now,  you’ll see three placeholder lectures: Population genomics I, II, and III. Not only will it take me a long time to decide what among the host of things I could spend my time on is most important for purposes of this course, it will also take me a long time to decide how to remove two lectures worth of material out of other lectures in the course.
  3. I hope to have all of my lecture notes revised before the semester begins. That way anyone who’s taking the course can choose either to download PDFs of individual lectures as we get to them or they can download a PDF with all of them (and some old lectures I no longer maintain) as a single PDF. If all goes well, that single PDF will be available on Figshare as version 3 of Lecture Notes in Population Genetics. Versions 1 and 2 (from 2012 and 2017 respectively) are already there.

If you’re thinking of enrolling in Population Genetics in Spring 2019, please take a look at the lecture schedule and let me know if there are things you’d like to know more about that either aren’t on the schedule or don’t seem to be given as much time on the schedule as you’d like. And whether you’re thinking of enrolling or not, if you’re reading this and have thoughts about what “greatest hits of population genomics” I should squeeze into the three days I’ve allotted for it, please drop me a line. Better yet, leave a comment so that others can see your suggestion.

I’ll be making short posts as I get each chapter of notes revised. If you’d like to see when they’re posted you can either follow me on Twitter (@keholsinger) or you can follow the course hashtag (#EEB5348).

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