SMBE2010

The SMBE 2010 meeting took place at the Lyon Convention Center located between the river Rhône and the Parc de la Tête d’Or in July 4-8 2010. The meeting attracted about 1,100 delegates from 45 countries (with most delegates coming from the USA), which made it one of the largest SMBE meetings. The scientific program included 4 plenary lectures and 28 symposia grouped into four general topics: Genome Evolution, Population Genomics/Theory, Phylogenomics, Molecular Evolution and Phenotypes. As usual the society organized the Fitch prize symposium and the undergraduate mentoring program poster session. In total, the scientific program included about 250 talks and about 600 posters. The gala dinner and award ceremony took place at the Brasserie Georges with 600 of the participants. For the first time at an SMBE meeting, plenary sessions were filmed and the videos can be found in this website and the SMBE website, and childcare services were available throughout the meeting.

The SMBE 2010 meeting ended July 8 after 4 years of preparation, which started in 2006 when Lyon submitted a proposal to the society for hosting the SMBE meeting. The year before the meeting, the organizing committee and the scientific committee have worked hard to organize the meeting and the prepare the scientific program, which included choosing and inviting 3 plenary speakers, developing 14 local symposia and selecting 14 external symposia. The symposium organizers then invited 81 speakers and selected about 150 contributed speakers among the 706 submitted abstracts.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of both committees and the symposium organizers for all the work that they have done and their commitment to make the SMBE 2010 meeting a success. We would like to thank all the PhD students and postdocs who volunteered to assist symposium chairmen and had a significant contribution in the symposia being well run and on-time. We would like to thank our contacts at the Lyon Convention Center Beatrice Morge and Laeticia Meyzonnet for their great professionalism, and the conference services of the University Lyon 1 and their team of undergraduate students who prepared the 1,100 conference packages, run the registration and help desk among other things. We thank all our sponsors especially the SMBE, CNRS and OUP for their significant support. Finally, we would like to thank all the participants for their enthusiasm during the meeting and all the positive feedback that we had after the meeting. We hope that we will see you again in Lyon.

Gabriel Marais & Manolo Gouy

Lead Organizers

Find the videos of the plenary talks and Fitch symposium presentations here

Find photos of the SMBE 2010 meeting here