Introductions
===

Hi everyone and thank you for joining us for the mRNA sequencing workshop at SETAC-NA 2018 in Sacramento. We are excited for this workshop, but we also have a lot to cover. Bear with us and we will try to have you leave with a set of skills that can be applied to your data.

### Here are your instructors for the day:
![Lisa](https://whiteheadresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/cohen.jpg) 
* __Lisa Johnson__ - PhD Candidate at UC Davis
    * Lisa is highly experienced in pipeline automation and has dealt with large transcriptomic datasets including:
        * ~700 marine invertebrate transcriptome re-assembly and optimization
        * transcriptomic assessment of osmotic challenge responses of 16 Fundulids adapted to various osmotic environments).

![Jane](https://whiteheadresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/036c84b-e1429642946393.jpg) 
* __Jane Park__ - PhD Candidate at UC Davis
    * Jane spends her time between the lab, where she samples embryonic _Fundulus heteroclitus_ exposed to oil and creating custom computational pipelines to analize differential expression to understand the impacts of oil on trans-generational responses.

![Elias](https://whiteheadresearch.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/elias1-e1504896758344.png) 
* __Elias Oziolor__ - Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis
    * Elias spent his dissertation time exploring the mechanism of adaptation which allows _F. grandis_ to adapt to heavy contamination
    * Currently he is working on developing computational tools for analyzing time-series population genomic data to understand the effects of population collapse in Pacific herring (_Clupea pallasii_), as well as assisting with the transcriptomic assessment of responses of herring to early developmental co-exposure of oil and viral challenge.