One of the most enjoyable parts of being an editor is the opportunity to travel to conferences, meetings, and to visit those kind enough to invite us into their laboratories. This gives us a chance to get to know the community we work with better and to hear about the latest happenings in different fields. As you can imagine this is not only enjoyable, but helps editors understand how the journal can best serve our core scientific communities.

I will take this opportunity of our new Nature Genetics blog to share with you some of my recent scientific travels.

This month I attended the 3rd Seattle Biostatistics Symposium, focused on statistical genetics.

[Third Seattle Symposium in Biostatistics: Statistical Genetics and Genomics ]

The symposium was co-sponsored by Rosetta/Merck, University of Washington, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and featured an impressive lineup of speakers that included many of the leaders in statistical genetics. This effort was spearheaded by co-chairs Eric Schadt (of Rosetta, a fully owned subsidiary of Merck) and John Storey (of the biostatistics department of University of Washington), who began two years ago to assemble this program. The organizing committee also included Bob Waterston (chair of Genome Sciences at University of Washington), Thomas Flemming (current Chair of Biostatistics, University of Washington), and Bruce Weir (who is in the process of moving to Seattle to assume his new post as Chair of the University Washington Biostatistics department). Over 400 participants joined the engaging lectures and discussions of the symposium, that included sessions on population based analyses, family based analyses, and analyses of microarrays and functional genomic data. About 100 also attended the pre-symposium workshops on design and analysis of microarray experiments (taught by John Storey and Katie Kerr of UW) and on analysis of population genetic data (taught by Matthew Stephens of UW and Jonathan Pritchard of University of Chicago).

Although the Seattle biostatistics symposium has been far from annual (so far it has been every 5 years), a few of the participants have presented in both of the previous symposiums. Although for reasons of confidentiality I will not include their names, looking back over the proceedings of these previous symposiums does afford a look at the nature and changing interests within biostatistics and the UW department, over the course of the past 10 years. The first symposium, held in 1995, covered ‘Survival Analysis’. The second symposium, held in 2000, focused on ‘Analysis of Correlated Data’. The proceedings of the previous symposiums have been published by Springer, and are of course available on amazon.com. The current symposium, focused on statistical genetics with an empahsis on human genetic data analyses and characterizing human genetic variation, seemed to reflect the general interest in several overlapping communities. This was also reflected by the appointment of Bruce Weir as new Chair of Biostatistics at UW, who hopes to emphasize statistical genetics, and strengthen ties with the department of Genome Sciences.