Models and Algorithms for Genome Evolution (MAGE) is an international meeting addressing the interdisciplinary area of genome evolution. MAGE is also celebrating the 50-year career of David Sankoff, a pioneer in computational genomics and biology. The community of computational evolutionary biologists is composed of mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, physicists and biologists, all willing to contribute to a better knowledge of the history of life on earth. The plurality of backgrounds yields a plurality of approaches, theoretical and empirical. The organizers represent a diverse international set of researchers at different stages of their careers. While the core of senior and early-career researchers have been invited and accepted, these funds will enable up to 20 students and postdocs to participate in the conference. In addition to the presentations and daily poster sessions, the meeting will also provide input to a book to be published by Springer in its series Computational Biology.
, which was a conference honoring David Sankoff's 50th anniversary of research contribution. (David Sankoff is one of the founders of computational geonomics, and, broadly, bioinformatics and computational biology.) The MAGE conference was held in Bromont, Quebec, Canada during Aug 23-26, 2013. There were 80 participants (24 from USA), from 12 countries including USA, Canada, Germany, France, etc. Intellectual Merit: The conference focused on three themes: the emergence of standard algorithms, new lights on current paradigms, and promising directions. These reflected the history, current research and future directions of genome evolution research, which will surely enhance the corresponding research. The 14 invited talks were further edited into a book titled "Models and Algorithms for Genome Evolution", subsequently published by Springer. Besides these invited talks, there were 10 extra contributed talks and 30 posters reporting the new results in computational genomics and genome evolution. Broader Impact: The NSF support for this project represents about 27% of the total budget of the conference. It helped supporting a number of invited speakers and graduate students from USA, which made the conference successful and enhanced the further research collaboration among researchers, graduate students, post-doc's in the area of computational genomics and genome evolution.
