The Biodiversity and Conservation Genomics Center (https://isg.uconn.edu/biodiversity/) within the Institute for Systems Genomics provides undergraduate and graduate level training through partnerships among UConn CLAS departments – EEB, MCB, and MARN. Undergraduates participate in a one year program that will sequence, assemble, and annotate an IUCN red-list species with partial support from Oxford Nanopore. The students will continue their study at the population level, working directly with practitioners to bridge the conservation genomics gap.
Graduate students and Postdocs in participating labs provide hands-on training and participate in the development of the first conservation genomics seminar. In partnership with the Computational Biology Core within the ISG, faculty and students are developing reproducible workflows for genome assembly/annotation, variant detection, and population genetics/landscape genetics.
Together, we are developing expertise within UConn, and partnerships outside of UConn, to support education, research, and outreach in conservation genomics across disparate disciplines.