UGA will host a symposium March 21 on bioinformatics and systems biology, an emerging field that is revolutionizing biomedical research. The third annual Computational and Systems Biology Symposium will present cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that integrates laboratory sciences, math, statistics, physics and computational science to model biological systems. The event will be held in Masters Hall of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education Conference Center and Hotel.
“Advances in diverse fields, including cancer therapy, treatment of genetic diseases and biofuels research, all stem from data mining and analysis provided by bioinformatics,” said William York, associate professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and computer science, and co-chair of the event. “Without bioinformatics, modern biology would not exist. This symposium will provide insight into groundbreaking, integrated approaches using bioinformatics and systems biology that can radically advance biological and biomedical research.”
Featured speakers are Philip Bourne, professor of pharmacology, University of California, LaJolla; Charles (Chip) Lawrence, professor of applied mathematics, Brown University; Michael Levine, professor of genetics and development, University of California, Berkeley; Dmitri Petrov, associate professor of biological sciences, Stanford University; Heinz-Bernd Schuttler, professor of physics, UGA; Jeffrey Skolnick, professor and director of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology; William B. Whitman, professor and head, microbiology, UGA; and Michael Zhang, professor and director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Opening remarks will be made by Ying Xu, director of UGA’s Institute of Bioinformatics, and David Lee, UGA vice president for research. The event is sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Biomedical and Health Sciences Institute, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the Institute of Bioinformatics.
“The topics cover a very wide spectrum, from drug design to developmental biology,” said Xu, who is co-chairing the symposium. “All our speakers are at the top of their fields. . . I hope this will get more people excited about this emerging area of research.”