Every year the Student Council invites top scientists from the field of Computational Biology to deliver a keynote address at the symposium. We usually ask our speakers to use a part of their time to talk about their experiences with careers development in the field or to include other useful advice to young researchers in their talk. In the past, we have had the privilege of hearing from various prominent researchers and scientists including Janet Thornton, Phil Bourne, Reinhard Schneider, Julio Collado-Vides, Burkhard Rost, Timothy Hughes, Mark Gerstein and Anna Tramontano.
Keynote Speakers
Integration of heterogeneous data in Biology: From chemicals to ecosystems
Peer Bork, EMBL Heidelberg, Germany
8:45 am - 9:30 am
Peer Bork, PhD, is senior group leader and joint coordinator of the Structural and Computational Biology unit at EMBL, a European research organization with headquarters in Heidelberg. He also holds an appointment at the Max-Delbrueck-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. Dr Bork received his PhD in Biochemistry (1990) and his habilitation in Theoretical Biophysics (1995). He works in various areas of computational biology and systems analysis with focus on function prediction, comparative analysis and data integration. He published more than 350 research articles in international, peer-reviewed journals, among them 40 in Nature, Science or Cell. According to ISI, Dr Bork is currently the most cited European researcher in Molecular Biology and Genetics. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals including Science and PloS Biology, and functions as senior editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology. Dr Bork co-founded four biotech companies, two of them went public. More than 25 of his former associates hold now professorships or other group leader positions in prominent places all over the world. For his achievements in nurturing and stimulating young scientists he received the Nature award for creative mentoring.
In search of overlooked functions: Hidden connections among proteins, toxins and viruses
Michal Linial, ISMB 2008 Co-chair; ECCB President,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
1:30 pm - 2:15 pm
Michal Linial, PhD, is a professor of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics and the Director of the Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology at the Hebrew University. Michal has an experimental and computational laboratory. She published over 100 scientific publications in peer reviewed journals and books. She is the editor of a book of toxins and secretion. Her expertise in cell biology and neurochemistry led to the study of protein families, protein-protein interactions with a global view on protein networks and their regulation. Michal and her colleagues apply proteomics and genomics approaches for studying changes in neuronal development, disease related conditions and behavior following stress. The solid informatics approaches are used for classification, validation and functional predictions. Michal is an active participant in the Structural Genomics international consortium. She is leading the first established educational program in Computer Science and Life Science for Undergraduate-Graduate studies in Israel (initiated at 1999). She is in the Board of director of the International society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and the chair of the steering committee of the European Computational Biology Conferences (ECCB). Michal is a member of the steering committee of RECOMB. She leads the protein family annotation task in the European BioSapiens consortium. She and her colleagues have created several global classification systems including ProtNet, ProTarget, EVEREST and PANDORA. All those developed web systems are provided as an open source for the medical and biological communities. For more information: www.ls.huji.ac.il/~michall/
Biological Networks: Facebook for Proteins
Trey Ideker, UC San Diego School of Medicine, USA
5:00 pm - 5:45 pm
Trey Ideker, PhD, is Chief of Genetics at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. He also serves as Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Member of the Moores UCSD Cancer Center. Ideker received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and his PhD from the University of Washington in Molecular Biology under the supervision of Dr Leroy Hood. He is a pioneer in using genome-scale measurements to construct network models of cellular processes and disease. His recent research activities include assembly of networks governing the response to DNA damage, development of software for protein network cross-species comparisons, and network-based diagnosis of disease. Ideker serves on the Editorial Boards for Bioinformatics and PLoS Computational Biology, Board of Directors for US-HUPO and the Cytoscape Consortium, and is a regular consultant for companies such as Monsanto, Genstruct, and Mendel Biotechnology. He was named one of the Top 10 Innovators of 2006 by Technology Review magazine and is this year’s recipient of the Overton Price from the International Society for Computational Biology. His work has been featured in news outlets such as The Scientist, the San Diego Union Tribune, and Forbes magazine.
