Český Krumlov, Czech Republic · 2008–2026
About
evomics
29
Editions
190
Faculty
860+
Sessions taught
1951+
Participants
Český Krumlov, Czech Republic · 2008–2026
29
Editions
190
Faculty
860+
Sessions taught
1951+
Participants
The workshops
evomics was a family of intensive training workshops taught between 2008 and 2026, at home in Český Krumlov from 2009: the Workshop on Molecular Evolution, the Workshop on Genomics, the Workshop on Phylogenomics, and the Workshop on Population and Speciation Genomics. Each ran for roughly two weeks, and together they covered the breadth of modern genome analysis.
It ran for two full weeks. Morning sessions were lectures from researchers actively working in the topics they taught. Afternoon and evening sessions were practicals: participants worked through real analyses on real data, with instructors on hand to debug and answer questions.
It was not a conference. There were no talks about finished work. Every session was teaching, and every practical was hands-on. Participants left with working code, working workflows, and a working understanding of methods they could not confidently use before arriving.
It filled a gap that courses, tutorials, and documentation rarely do: the space between understanding a method conceptually and being able to apply it to your own data. Closing that gap was the point.
Location
Český Krumlov is a small medieval town in southern Bohemia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and an unlikely venue for a genomics workshop. That was partly the point.
The town is compact enough that participants ran into each other constantly, in the streets, in the one coffee shop everyone ended up at, at dinner. There was nowhere to disappear to. Conversations that started in a lecture hall continued over food and continued again the next morning. This compression of time and space mattered: two weeks in Krumlov was worth more than four weeks in a city where everyone disperses in the evening.
Lectures took place in the Town Theatre, built in the 18th century. Practicals ran in the House of the Prelate, a former monastery. Both buildings are within walking distance of the hotel.
Genomics curriculum
The Workshop on Genomics ran the longest, fifteen editions, and its curriculum changed substantially between 2011 and 2026 as the methods researchers used changed. What follows traces that arc. The Phylogenomics and Population Genomics workshops have their own, session by session, in their archives.
2011–2014
The sequencing era
The workshop launched as next-generation sequencing moved from core facilities to individual labs. Core topics: read alignment, assembly basics, variant calling, annotation. Most participants were encountering the data for the first time.
2015–2018
Depth and specialisation
As sequencing became routine, the curriculum deepened. Dedicated sessions on population genomics, structural variation, metagenomics, and comparative genomics. Practicals moved from toy datasets to real research data.
2019–2022
Long reads and assembly
PacBio and Oxford Nanopore changed what genome assembly meant. The workshop tracked the shift: long-read alignment, de novo assembly of complex genomes, hybrid approaches. A new generation of instructors came with it.
2023–2026
Pangenomics, single-cell, and AI tools
The reference genome gave way to reference graphs. Single-cell methods expanded from bulk RNA-seq to spatial transcriptomics and became a dedicated track. Assembly deepened: manual curation of chromosome-scale genomes joined the programme as its own session. In 2026, the curriculum introduced large language models in bioinformatics for the first time, reflecting how the field's tooling has changed.
The full session-by-session record is in the workshop archive.
What's next
The evomics workshops ran for eighteen years, from 2008 to 2026. This site remains as the archive of that work.
The tradition continues through independent workshops led by members of the original faculty and their collaborators. As those programmes are announced, they are listed on the Continuing page.
Contact
Questions about the workshops, the archive, or faculty profiles can be sent to handley@wustl.edu. For workshops continuing the programme, see the Continuing page.