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We're in Estonia!

Posted on August 27, 2008 in Genographic Project News

Estonia skyline.jpg
Photograph by Lindsey Larson
The skyline of Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia.


This week the entire Genographic Project team travelled from all over the world to Tallinn, Estonia for our third annual Genographic Project Scientific Conference! We have had the most amazingly warm welcome from President Toomas Hendrik Ilves as well as from Richard Villems, who also is from Estonia. It's been great to see all of our friends here - the Genographic Project works with a diverse bunch of geneticists, anthropologists, linguists, computational biologists, as well as our friends at Applied Biosystems, IBM and the Waitt Family Foundation. So to get everyone in the same room and chatting about our work so far has been awesome. Additionally, Richard Villems brought along some `home-team` scientists from Tartu and Tallinn to a roundtable discussion at the Estonian Academy of Science.

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Spanish Launch 3-compressed.jpgPhotograph by Ariadna Arnes
David Comas and Jaume Bertranpetit present the Genographic Project in Barcelona

Some exciting news on the Public Participation side of the Genographic Project--we have launched the Project in Spanish! So officially, the Genographic Team would like to send out an "hola" to everyone! We kicked off the Spanish launch in Barcelona on June 25 with an awesome lecture by David Comas and Jaume Bertranpetit, two of Genographic's Principal Investigators (that's them in the picture above in Barcelona).

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San2 blogphoto.jpgPhotograph by Spencer Wells
A San Bushman woman in southern Africa; the San retain links to the deepest branch in the human family tree.


As the first Genographica blog post, it's appropriate that I'm posting from Africa - or 'the homeland', as those of us in the population genetics biz call call her.  For the past few days, some of our DC-based science team and myself have been visiting our sub-Saharan Africa regional center at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, headed by Professor Himla Soodyall. So far, we've had a fascinating discussion of the data that's already been generated, planning for several exciting projects to come, as well as a review of our laboratory procedures and other protocols.

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