Nearly 300 people from academia and industry gathered at The University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience in July to learn how data can be used to achieve medical and other research breakthroughs at the 10th Winter School in Mathematical and Computational Biology.
Event organiser Dr Nick Hamilton said the school had been an undoubted success, with many early-career researchers registered and one third of the participants travelling from interstate or overseas to attend.
“Mathematics and computing is increasingly being used to advance biological research and gain insights into how our bodies function in health and disease both at population and personal levels,” Dr Hamilton said.
“Modern research technology generates huge amounts of data and new methods for sorting, analysing and interpreting this data are constantly being developed.
“Winter School aims to bring the potential of these techniques to the attention of the next generation of researchers so we were pleased to welcome delegates from six countries to Queensland for this event.”
Featured speakers included Professor John Quackenbush from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health, who worked on the Human Genome Project and was recently honoured by the White House as an Open Science Champion of Change.
Professor Quackenbush spoke on the increasingly affordability of genome sequencing and how biomedical research is rapidly evolving into an information science in which the winners in the race to cure disease are likely to be those best at managing data.
Dr Norman Pace, the Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado-Boulder gave a special seminar on the molecular evidence underlying the progression of early evolution.
The Winter School in Mathematical and Computational Biology is held every year in July and organised by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics.
The 2013 Winter School was organised by Dr Hamilton, Professor Mark Ragan and Lanna Wong.
To give a tax-deductible donation to IMB’s data-driven biomedical research please visit www.imb.uq.edu/donate or call (07) 3346 2132.
The Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB) is a research institute of The University of Queensland that aims to improve quality of life by advancing personalised medicine, drug discovery and biotechnology.
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Media contact: Bronwyn Adams, IMB Communications Officer – 0418 575 247 or 07 3346 2134
