Online Webinar (COVEME) – Monday August 30 – Friday September 3, 2021, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Financial support from The Rockefeller Foundation is sponsoring 65 African fellows to attend the COVEME workshop.
The Bioinformatics Workshop on Virus Evolution and Molecular Epidemiology is a workshop consisting of an online webinar focused on coronavirus research (COVEME) aimed at international students and an on-site workshop (VEME Light) aimed at Brazilian students only. The online workshop consists of 4 full days of seminars and breakout sessions, followed by a day of poster presentations. The on-site workshop will be organized in Minas Gerais state, Brazil, and will comprise 6 full days of theoretical lectures, practical sessions and keynote presentations; including a new optional Sunday program.
Combating viral spread and their associated disease burden is a tremendous challenge requiring significant research efforts and dedicated measures, informing public health, veterinary care, and agriculture strategies. Viral sequence data is a major asset in the characterization of pathogens. Understanding the processes that generate genetic diversity assists in the struggle against viral infections and enhances our understanding of past evolutionary and epidemiological events. It can also help in the identification of the origins of new epidemics, in monitoring the effectiveness of therapeutic strategies, and eventually in predicting the behavior of viral epidemics. Advances in bioinformatics have led to improved approaches to investigating viral outbreaks that have been successfully applied to viruses including Human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV), the Ebola virus, the Dengue, Zika, Chikungunya and Yellow Fever viruses.
The online webinar has a maximum capacity of 500 attendees and the registration fee for the full 5 days is 100 euro. Each day’s program typically comprises 3 seminars which each consist of multiple presentations followed by a Q&A or a breakout session; the final day consists of selected poster presentations from participants.