Following the 1st Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars Workshop at ETH Zurich Nov. 18-20, 2013, the University of Oxford will host the 2nd Moorea IDEA workshop to further explore how to build a computational model of place “from genome up”. The goal of the Oxford meeting is to further define the overarching scope of the Moorea IDEA, with particular emphasis on the biological dimensions, especially genomics and microbial interactions. This workshop will assemble a variety of researchers and we will continue to work on the Grand Challenge Question and Products identified at the first workshop. These workshops are part of a series of workshops that begin to elaborate various aspects of the overall Moorea Avatar project.
Speaker(s)
Neil Davies
Neil Davies is Executive Director of UC Berkeley’s Gump South Pacific Research Station in Moorea, French Polynesia - the only coral reef site (MCR-LTER) in NSF’s Long Term Ecological Research network. Davies received his Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics from University College London and has conducted fieldwork across the Caribbean, Latin America, and Pacific Islands. He is an Associate Researcher at the Biodiversity Institute of Oxford University, and a member of the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEOBON - Genetics Working Group). He serves on the boards of the Genomic Standards Consortium, the National Association of Marine Labs and the Tetiaroa Society.
His research at BIDS focuses on sustainability science and how biodiversity genomics can contribute to a computational model of place - including the ‘datafication’ of whole social-ecological systems from genomes to society. To that end, he is lead PI of the Moorea Biocode Project, chair of the Genomic Observatories Network, and co-founder of the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) Consortium.