From the Mathematical Biosciences Institute of the Ohio State University

Guest Post from Dr. John W. Wenzel:
As a point of information, earlier statements posted by other writers on this blog may have led to mistaken impressions. The 2005 workshops run by the Mathematical Biosciences Institute of the Ohio State University were entirely organized and funded by the MBI (see http://www.mbi.osu.edu/). From the web site, we read the relevant events as follows:

September 7-9, 12-13, 2005
Tutorial on Tree Reconstruction and Coalescence Theory
September 26-30, 2005
Workshop 1: Phylogeography and Phylogenetics
November 14-18, 2005
Workshop 2: Aspects of Self-Organization in Evolution
December 1-2, 2005
Current Topics Workshop: The Problems of Phylogenetic Analysis of Large Datasets

The three workshops on phylogenetics were arranged under the direction of Dennis Pearl of our Department of Statistics. Dennis had help from people he chose for each workshop. In the September 26-30 workshop on phylogenetics, contributors were in order, (again from the web site) Elizabeth Allman, Mike Steel, Flavia F. Jesus, Ligia Mateiu, Michael Hickerson, Jeff Pan, Amy Russell, Liang Liu, Bryan C. Carstens, Yoko Satta, Craig Moritz, Antonis Rokas, Marc Suchard, Tandy Warnow, Laura Salter Kubatko, Susan Holmes, Scott Edwards, Noah Rosenberg, Mark Beaumont, Lacey Knowles, Stuart Baird, Peter Beerli, Chuck Cannon, and Robert Griffiths. In the December workshop that attracted so much attention on this blog, speakers were in order: Walter Fitch, Diego Pol, Dan Janies, Usman Roshan, Pablo Goloboff, James Farris, Bernard Moret, Andres Varon, Ward Wheeler, Gonzalo Giribet, Alexandros Stamatakis, and Bret Larget. The substantial funding and organization that OSU has put forward is aimed at producing the highest caliber program. We are proud of our accomplishments, we continue to lead by example with subsequent and current workshops, and we invite others to emulate our efforts.