Fourth RECOMB Satellite Conference on Bioinformatics Education

Guest Speaker: Christopher Lee, UCLA (pictured) et al. Date: August 26th, 2012 Time: All day Location: St Petersburg Dept of Steklov Mathematical Institute RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia [event website] [registration]

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: This one-day workshop, featuring talks by UCLA chemistry professor Christopher Lee and other invited speakers, is co-sponsored by Calit2 and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, together with St. Petersburg Academic University and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. The Fourth Annual RECOMB Conference on Bioinformatics Education (RECOMB-BE) will follow the first three RECOMB-BE meetings (2009, 2010 and 2011). RECOMB-BE 2012 will consist of invited presentations, oral presentations selected from submitted educational problems, and discussion panels, all of which focus on improving bioinformatics education. The goals of RECOMB-BE 2012 are twofold: to showcase best practices of teaching algorithmic bioinformatics and to demonstrate and discuss a novel learning framework (ROSALIND) for students to understand bioinformatics problems through programming within a guided feedback environment. While biology has been transformed into a computational science in the last decade, the biological curriculum remains largely unchanged with respect to computational issues. How should we teach bioinformatics to biology students? The question has become of the utmost importance, as many universities have not only founded undergraduate bioinformatics programs but are considering the addition of new computational courses to the standard biology curriculum — a change that would represent a dramatic paradigm shift in biology education. SPEAKER BIO: Invited speakers announced so far include Michael Brudno (University of Toronto), Uri Keich (University of Sydney), and Christopher Lee (UCLA). UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry as well as molecular biology Christopher Lee (pictured) received a B.A. summa cum laude in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1988 from Harvard College, and a Ph.D. in Structural Biology from Stanford University in 1993. He co-founded Molecular Applications Group with Michael Levitt in 1993, and served as Vice-President for Research until 1998. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford, he joined the UCLA faculty in 1998. His training provided an unusual combination of experimental cell biology, biophysics, and algorithm development, which he has has applied at UCLA to bioinformatics analysis of genome evolution. He has led efforts to establish a bioinformatics Ph.D. program at UCLA. He has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors, NIH National Center for Biotechnology Information, and serves on the editorial board of Biology Direct. His current research focuses on alternative splicing and its role in genome evolution. MORE INFORMATION: To register and pay online, go to http://bioinf.spbau.ru/be2012/registration and click on the Registration Form. *Registration is Required