UA’s BIO5 Institute hosting prestigious RECOMB 2009 conference

UA’s BIO5 Institute is hosting the 13th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) May 17-21. The conference has attracted to Tucson, 250 top academic and industry computational biologists from 18 countries for the five-day event. Thirteen faculty, staff and students from the UA are participating, including Ecology and Evolutionary Biology professor Michael Hammer, who is one of seven conference keynote speakers. His UA affiliations include BIO5, Arizona Research Laboratories, Department of Anthropology, and the Arizona Cancer Center.

To learn more, read Alan Fischer’s story in the Tucson Citizen: http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/breakingnews/116563.php

BIO5 joins the ranks of previous high-profile conference hosts that include the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; QB3 Institute of the University of California Berkeley, the University of California San Francisco and the University of California Santa Cruz; The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany; and Celera Genomics in Washington DC.

“RECOMB is a scientific forum of the highest caliber for theoretical advances in computational biology and applications in molecular biology and medicine,” said RECOMB2009 conference chair and BIO5 member John Kececioglu, PhD, associate professor, UA Department of Computer Science. “Some of the foremost scientific thinkers leading the personalized genomics revolution have been selected by my colleague Serafim Batzoglou, PhD, program committee chairman for RECOMB2009 and associate professor in computer sciences at Stanford University.”

The program features more than 40 keynote and paper presentations and two poster sessions from the international community of computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computational biologists.

In addition, industry representatives from 23andMe, Illumina, Navigenics, NextBIO, and Complete Genomics will participate in a panel discussion about the future of affordable personal genomic analysis.

 “Analyzing an individual’s genome may someday help doctors identify disease susceptibility and then customize prevention strategies for their patients,” said Dr. Kececioglu. “Although mapping the first human genome cost $3 billion, many computational biologists are working towards improved processes and technology that, within just a few years, may make this information available to consumers for less than $1,000.”

For more about the conference:
http://www.bio5.org/recomb2009/