[IEEE-bhpjobs] samsi

[Walter Heger]

If you are interested in the following workshop,
please go to 
http://www.samsi.info/200405/compbio/compbio-registration200505.html
to register.

SAMSI Symposium:
Collective Computational Biology for Infectious Disease
The Radisson Hotel, RTP

We are convening a three-day workshop to explore novel approaches to the 
amelioration of infectious disease in the developing world through 
collective, open source and public efforts in computational biology and 
informatics.  We will gather experts to help identify those scientific 
problems and approaches most susceptible to these methods, and  the 
organization of public resources, the coordination of collective research 
efforts, and the dissemination of educational materials to address these 
critical problems.  Our ultimate goal is to speed the development of drugs, 
vaccines and other therapeutic and prophylactic interventions where 
financial and market-based incentives are unlikely to lead to the desired 
results.

The meeting will consist of two days of working sessions and a one-day 
public symposium.

Background

The completion of the human genome project promises to usher in a new era of 
biomedical advancement, but the path from genome sequence to disease cure is 
complex and will require significant contributions from the mathematical and 
information sciences for its illumination.  The time, energy and financial 
resources required to turn DNA sequences into disease cures is now invested 
most heavily into projects with high probability of monetary 
reward—cardio-vascular disease, cancer, and aging, for example.  
Infectious disease remains a major cause of premature death worldwide, but 
brings suffering disproportionately to people in the developing world.  
Relief from the scourges of malaria, schistosomiasis and leishmaniasis, for 
example, will not soon flow from market forces alone.

The open source movement in software development provides a powerful 
paradigm for harnessing the power of collective intelligence for the 
solution of complex practical problems.  We believe that infectious disease 
genomics can be effectively studied and utilized for the development of 
drugs and vaccines using similar methods.  There will be, however, 
significant challenges.  These challenges involve many social and legal 
issues, such as intellectual property rights, the appropriate assignment of 
credit and recognition for successes, the coordination of efforts, quality 
control and financial support.

Our intent during this three day meeting is to determine the key scientific 
questions and research opportunities as well as the social, legal and policy 
challenges and develop strategies to address them.  This is necessarily a 
broadly interdisciplinary effort.  We seek to enlist the participation of 
key members of the scientific and medical communities as well as of the 
genomics, bioinformatics, computing and mathematical sciences communities to 
help lead the effort.

Tom Kepler, Lindsay Cowell (Duke University Laboratory of Computational 
Immunology)

Arti Rai, Stephen Maurer, and Andrej Sali (Tropical Disease Initiative)


Schedule: Sunday, 22 May 2005
9:00  Jim Berger, SAMSI
Welcome
9:15  Tom Kepler, Duke University Medical Center
Collective Intelligence
9:30  Stephen Maurer, Berkeley
The Tropical Disease Initiative
10:30  break
10:45  Marc Marti-Renom, University of California San Francisco
The Science of the Tropical Disease Initiative
11:30  Lunch
12:45 pm   Bob Desowitz, UNC-CH
The Malaria Capers
1:45 pm   Philip Awadalla, NCSU
Genome-Wide Inferences Of Recombination, Postive And Negative Selection In 
The Agent Of Malaria, Plasmodium Falciparum – Towards A Malaria Hapmap
2:45 pm  break
3:00 pm  Tim Haystead, Duke
Proteomics for Malaria Drug and Vaccine Target Discovery
4:00 pm  Jessica Kissinger, University of Georgia
PlasmoDB: The Plasmodium Genome Resource
5:00 pm  Victoria McGovern, Burroughs-Wellcome Foundation
Future Direction for Malaria Research
6:00 pm  The Organizers
closing remarks



Thomas B Kepler, Professor
Division Chief, Computational Biology
Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics

Box 90090, Duke University , Durham, NC   27708-0090
101A North Building, Research Drive
voice: +1 919 681 0620; FAX:  +1 919 668 2465