April 12, 2024
Taras K. Oleksyk, associate professor in OU’s Department of Biological Sciences, has received an award from the American Genetic Association to organize ConGen2025: Recent Advances in Conservation Genetics.
Offered January 5-15, 2025, at the Cheetah Conservation Fund Research Center in Otjiwarongo, Namibia, the short course will host 25-30 students dedicated to conservation and about 15-20 faculty from around the world, and will offer a unique opportunity for learning about the latest advances in genome and conservation sciences. To help the conservation community to stay current with the rapidly developing technology and analytical methods, ConGen2025 activities will include hands-on training tutorials in methods, interpretation, and applications of genomic analyses for the conservation of endangered species.
Conservation genetics is an important field of science that uses genetic information to design strategies for conservation and management of species in danger of extinction. Among its main goals is finding ways to help species to stand up to the environmental changes and to preserve biodiversity.
“Recent advances in genomics and bioinformatics have been changing this field making ever more comprehensive analyses possible. At the same time, conservation challenges are not nation-bound, they transcend international boundaries, and call for collaborations between scientists from different places,” said Dr. Oleksyk. “This is the nature of ConGen – every time we take the course to a different continent we can reach the local researchers and conservation professionals close to their place of work. In the past, we have brought this course to Panama, Puerto Rico, Hungary, South Africa, Poland, and the USA. Next year we are excited to bring ConGen to Namibia.”
ConGen has been taught by many leading scientists from around the world for more than two decades. In past editions of this course, participating students and faculty represented on average 17-18 countries each year. Participants (including advanced graduate students, post-docs, teachers and researchers with advanced degrees) are conservation scientists representing academia, government, NGOs, and industry studying genetics of endangered species. This effort results in an ever-expanding global network of conservation-minded professionals that continue staying in touch, communicating, sharing ideas, and collaborating on conservation projects across the globe for many years. Conservation-minded scientists can learn more about ConGen2025 course and apply to participate at the ConGen webpage.
Among this year’s keynote speakers are Laurie Marker, executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, an international organization dedicated to saving the cheetah in the wild, and ConGen Chief and Founder Dr. Stephen J. O’Brien, professor and research director at NOVA Southeastern University (Florida) and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). Dr. O’Brien visited OU in 2019 to deliver a talk and to meet with students and faculty. He is widely recognized for his 25-year tenure as Chief of the Laboratory of Genomics Diversity at the National Cancer Institute, for discovering the first AIDS restriction gene, which helped save thousands of lives, and as founder of the Genome 10K Project (now called VGP), an international effort to sequence the genome of every species on Earth.
Dr. Oleksyk has worked with researchers at Oakland University and other institutions on genetic studies to help save Amazon parrots from extinction and to describe a genome of a critically endangered Hispaniolan solenodon.