January 11, 2002
Dear Colleagues,
We hope that you have all enjoyed a safe and happy New Year, and that you are as excited and enthusiastic as we are about the Workshop and Congress coming this May. This update contains important "late breaking" information about our project timeline as well as the timelines for the Workshop and Congress. In particular, please note that the deadline for "Late Breaking Abstract" submission for the Congress is April 1, 2002. It seems likely that there will be additional changes over the next five months, and we will try to keep you informed in a timely fashion as these become known.
Extension of deadline for International Congress Abstract Submissions
Eighteen of the "best" abstracts will be selected for presentation as Featured Papers in one of three plenary sessions. First authors of Featured papers will receive a merit award. All accepted abstracts will be published in a special issue of Tissue Antigens. "Late Breaking Abstracts" are being accepted until April 1. Accepted "Late Breaking Abstracts" will be eligible for poster and/or simultaneous oral presentations. To submit a "Late Breaking Abstract" to the International Congress, visit the IHWC web site's for a downloadable Microsoft WORD template. REMEMBER, the completed template should be mailed back to the IHWC Secretary at secretary@www.ihwc.org before April 1. (no fooling)
Register for the Workshop/Congress
The XIII International Congress will be held in Seattle, Washington May 18-22, 2002 following the 13th International Histocompatibility Workshop (IHWS) meeting in Victoria, BC, Canada May 12-16, 2002. To register for either the International Congress meeting or the IHWS meeting, please visit http://www.regweb.com/csnw/ihwc.
Preliminary Analyses of Submitted Data
Last month we described a bottleneck in the data-analysis process that resulted from the overwhelming number of data files that were submitted in anticipation of the 12/31/01 deadline. We are still working with the database to process and analyze the submitted datasets, but given the new deadline for abstract submissions, we hope to be able to accommodate all of you who have requested preliminary analyses of your data for the purpose of submitting abstracts for the conference. We appreciate the patience and support that you have shown. A submission process for so-called "Late Breaking Abstracts" (see above) relating findings generated in the next several months will be announced soon after the abstract submission deadline is past.
In addition, we urge all of you to submit abstracts for the Congress in the field of 'Human Diversity'. These abstracts do not necessarily have to be related to work completed as a part of the IHWG. We would like to accumulate a critical number of Human Diversity abstracts, in the hopes of justifying one or more oral presentation sessions focused on this topic.
Anthropology Component Program at IHWS
The IHWS meeting will be held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada from May 12-16. The Anthropology /Human Genetic Diversity component's program at the Workshop will consist of two three hour "workshop" sessions, and one two hour Plenary Session. This Plenary Session will feature a presentation by Dr. Mark Stoneking on Molecular Anthropology, as well as presentations by the Biostatistics core and Anthropology Component Team on the meta-analyses carried out on the Workshop data. Although our plans are still preliminary, it is our hope that project participants can meet as a working group for the two workshop sessions to engage in in-depth discussions of the data and analyses, generate new hypotheses based on these results, and determine future courses of research to address these new hypotheses.
In addition, we hope that project participants will be willing to speak on areas of specific interest to the field of Anthropology and Human Genetic Diversity during these working group meetings. Please contact us if you are interested in presenting at one of these working group sessions. In order to get an idea of the level of attendance that these meetings will have, we would appreciate it if you could (informally) notify us if you intend to attend either the Workshop meeting (IHWS) or the International Congress. We are very much looking forward to meeting with you this May.
New Fax Number
Finally, we have a new permanent fax number for the Anthropology Component. Our new fax number is 510 883-7910. Please send all faxes to this number. Faxes sent to the old fax numbers may eventually reach us, but we no longer have any way to guarantee that.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or need any assistance with the Anthropology Component.
With Best Regards,
Henry Erlich, Steve Mack, and Andrea Jani
Anthropology / Human Genetic Diversity Component
