RECOMB Satellite Conference on Bioinformatics Education

Guest Speaker: Richard Karp, UC Berkeley et al. Professor, EECS Date: March 14th, 2009   to March 15th, 2009 Time: 8:30am-5pm Location: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego [webcast] Host: Pavel Pevzner, Director, CASB [event website] [registration]

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: The purpose of RECOMB-BE is to showcase best practices and discuss existing challenges in bioinformatics education, with an emphasis on undergraduate education. The conference will also promote collaborations among educators in order to develop a stable curriculum that truly reflects state-of-the-art bioinformatics. The meeting will also showcase selected bioinformatics research projects conducted by undergraduate students. While biology has been transformed into an informational and computational science in the last decade, the biology curriculum remains largely unchanged with respect to computational courses. The question, "How to teach bioinformatics to biology students?", is particularly important at a time when many universities have already started undergraduate bioinformatics programs and discussions are under way about adding new computational courses to the standard biology curriculum - a dramatic paradigm shift in biology education. However, there has been no satisfactory answer to date in response to the educational question of how to deliver computational ideas to biologists. It is a problem when bioinformatics courses cater to a protocol-centric pragmatic approach, focusing on parameter settings, application-specific features and so on, without revealing the computational ideas behind the algorithms. Imagine a calculus course teaching physicists and engineers how to compute integrals without attempting to explain what 'integral' means. Physicists and engineers escaped this pitfall, probably because they understood that the recipe-based approach to computational science would restrict scientific research in their core disciplines. It is important to communicate the pitfalls of recipe-based approaches to bioinformatics, and RECOMB-BE aims to demonstrate the intricacy, practicality and beauty of modern bioinformatics at the undergraduate level. SPEAKER BIO: Bios for speakers can be viewed at http://casb.calit2.net/bioed/speakers.html. MORE INFORMATION: Parking, directions and other logistics can be viewed at http://casb.calit2.net/bioed/logistics.html. *Registration is Required