Past Meetings

Read more about the 7th Annual SFAF Meeting in this feature article from the DOE JGI magazine, The Primer (Summer 2012 edition)

Advancing Genomics through Innovation and Collaboration

The Sequencing, Finishing and Analysis for the Future (SFAF) meeting dates back to 2006, when the Genomics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was given the mission to finish the genomes of the hundreds of microbes that the US DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) was sequencing every year. Back then, many gaps remained after the initial sequencing and assembly process.

We decided "assemble" (no pun intended 😁) the top genome finishers from the "G7" (the genome institutes charged with the public effort of sequencing the human genome), so we could continue learning how to leverage the newest genomic technologies and analysis approaches. Read more >>

Our first meeting had 70 attendees and was focused primarily on lab techniques and genome finishing. The beautiful town of Santa Fe with its rich culture and history became was chosen as the venue for our first annual meeting in May 2006, and has remained our home ever since. Over the past 19 years, our meeting content has evolved to encompass the rapidly growing range of genomics applications in human health, agriculture, environmental sciences, and biotechnology, combined with leaps and bounds made in bioinformatics and big data management.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to become more creative with our meeting format in order to stay in touch with our community throughout travel restrictions. We embraced the Whova platform in order to to present our 15th annual meeting virtually in 2020. To due ongoing global disruptions, we ended up foregoing our annual meeting in 2021— in lieu of two virtual single-day sessions in September 2021 and February 2022—before resuming our annual in-person meetings in June 2022.

We emerged from the pandemic with consensus that genome finishing was no longer the key focus area of our meeting. To align with our expanding scope, we renamed the meeting to Sequence to Function: Applications and Analysis for the Future (SFA²F). Our 16th annual meeting in 2022 was our first under this banner. We celebrated one of the ultimate achievements in genome finishing with a tour de force keynote address by Karen Miga, leader of the T2T consortium. To emphasize function, we have intentionally added more multi-omics content, including proteomics (see Jeff Nivala's 2024 keynote address).

Our annual meeting now typically has 300+ attendees with a primary goal of bringing together a diverse group of motivated and highly collaborative scientists from academia, government, industry, and international health consortia who are passionate about realizing the promise of genomics and personalized medicine across all aspects of our lives, health, and global sustainability. The meeting's unique, single-stream format makes it easy to absorb high-quality scientific content across the full range of topics and sessions, participate in interactive panel discussions, and promotes effective networking between all attendees, including our valued sponsors and exhibitors.