Brian O'Meara

@omearabrian
1.9K Followers
4.3K Following
191 Posts

I study diversification, species delimitation, trait evolution & other macroevolutionary questions, often using new methods. Also random coding projects in my own time. I'm a college professor.

Views my own. Living in Oak Ridge, TN, USA.

I often follow interesting mastodon servers by following all their users (basically, merging several local feeds). Bonus is this helps new people get at least one follower (me) quickly.

He/him

#evolution #biology #rstats

PronounsHe/Him
Websitehttps://brianomeara.info
Githubhttps://github.com/bomeara
Course ads on R-sig-phylo https://brianomeara.info/posts/rsig/
Course ads on R-sig-phylo – Brian O’Meara

The main mailing list for phylogenetics in R, R-sig-phylo, is now nearly all ads for courses from a small set of companies. It would be great if they stopped this.

I'm taking over for the wonderful Nina Fefferman as interim director of NIMBioS, the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems. For 17 years NIMBioS has been at the forefront of mathematics-biology, modeling, team science, and more. Much of my work wouldn't have been possible without it, and that's true for hundreds of people.

Please reach out to me with ideas for its next phase!

https://www.nimbios.org/nimbios-welcomes-interim-director/

NIMBioS Welcomes Interim Director – NIMBioS

Funding for tenure – Brian O’Meara

Faculty funding should not play a role in tenure decisions, especially now

Uncertainty and risk – Brian O’Meara

How we communicate and handle risks to students from federal funding uncertainty

Website and free webinar on applying to grad school in ecology and evolution, with a focus on the "#HiddenCurriculum" students might not know. Please share!

* How funding works
* How to choose advisor
* Mental health
* PhD vs Masters
* And more

Website: http://applyingtoeeb.info
Webinar: Oct 24, 11 am US Eastern, 8 am US Pacific, 15:00 UTC

Please let me know suggestions, too

Applying to Graduate School in Ecology, Evolution, and Related Fields

We are recruiting new EvoAllies for the Evolution meetings as part of our SafeEvolution initiative. The goal of the program is to improve the climate at the meetings, making them more welcoming for everyone. It is not enforcement (we have a safety officer to investigate and sanctioning committee), but rather to help de-escalate situations, direct people to resources to help them, and to identify any problems.

Apply by June 7 at https://forms.gle/vwmupy6tuXqLijWUA

EvoAllies 2024

We are recruiting new EvoAllies for the Evolution meetings as part of our SafeEvolution initiative. The goal of the program is to improve the climate at the meetings, making them more welcoming for everyone. It is not enforcement (we have a safety officer to investigate and sanctioning committee to put in place any sanctions if warranted), but rather to help de-escalate situations, direct people to resources to help them, and to identify any problems. People who sign up and are selected must attend a two hour online training on June 11, at 11 am US Eastern time (3 pm UTC, 8 am US Pacific) by members of the UT CLIMBS team (https://socialactionrt.org/utclimbs) and members of the Code of Conduct Committee. We want to recruit people with a variety of life experiences, perspectives, and career stages. Our goal is to make people feel safe at the meeting; to that end, if you are facing or have faced questions about your possible misconduct, or have other reasons why your selection would be controversial, we ask that you do not sign up. Applications will be evaluated by a subset of members of the Code of Conduct Committee and current EvoAllies. Applications close June 7 at 5 pm US Eastern time; chosen applicants will be notified by June 10 at noon US Eastern time.

Google Docs

New #OpenAccess paper on evolution of root-nodule symbiosis (key in nitrogen fixation), including rate heterogeneity and both gains and losses. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48036-3 . Team effort by multiple research groups; important for the cool #evolution and #ecology but could also have implications for agriculture (understanding how nitrogen fixation evolves and is lost)

#phylogenetics #biology

Shifts in evolutionary lability underlie independent gains and losses of root-nodule symbiosis in a single clade of plants - Nature Communications

Kates et al. propose that nitrogen-fixing symbiosis between bacteria and angiosperms has been gained and lost multiple times, based on ancestral reconstructions of nodulation across a deeply sampled, 13,000-species phylogeny, in contrast to a single origin with many losses.

Nature

New paper! "dentist: Quantifying uncertainty by sampling points around maximum likelihood estimates". Easy thing to plug into R workflows for getting better confidence intervals and detecting potential identifiability issues. #OpenAccess paper at https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14297, website at https://bomeara.github.io/dentist/, blog post at https://brianomeara.info/posts/dentist/

#Rstats #OpenSource #FOSS

Brian O’Meara - Dentist for likelihood

A new way to estimate uncertainty in likelihood

Did demo for intro bio grad students on #Rstats, focused on what they could do with it, ways to organize code, etc. (they all had a little experience already).

Demo page with quarto: https://bomeara.github.io/geewhizR/

Source: https://github.com/bomeara/geewhizR/

I had them use Visual Studio (rather than closed source Rstudio) but windows users had issues with R install