Home | Overview | Application | Course Work and Research | Faculty | Contact | FAQ | BCBSI Archive | NIH-NSF BBSI

High-throughput genomic approaches are generating vast amounts of DNA and protein sequence and structure data, genetic map information, and gene expression profiles. The pace of data accumulation is rapidly outrunning the rate of data processing and comprehension. The value of data repositories will ultimately be valuable only to the extent that the data can be interpreted, annotated and integrated. The broad aim here is to increase the number of trained scientists, in order to shorten the time between biological data acquisition, knowledge derivation, and practical application of new insights. This is a critical challenge since these fields are remarkably interdisciplinary and draw on contributions from biologists, computer scientists, statisticians, engineers, and physical scientists. Our goal is to provide the basic training in Computational and Systems Biology for students at an early stage of their studies, and to provide incentives and perspectives that will encourage them to seek careers in computational and systems biology, thus enlarging the pool of creative, well-educated professionals in this interdisciplinary area.

Aims. The aims of the Summer Institute are to provide students with the necessary basic skills to identify and tackle important research problems in computational and systems biology and to encourage them to pursue careers in these fields. A key aspect of the training program is its emphasis on integrating state-of-the-art bioinformatics approaches with the analysis of massive biological data sets from broad areas such as genome sequencing, microarray experiments, proteomics, protein-protein interactions, and other high-throughput methods. The goal of the short course will be to inform the students how the diverse research areas are being analyzed and integrated into modern biology, and what tools are being used to facilitate their integration. During their internships, the students will complete small research projects where they will learn a specific area of integrated Computational and Systems Biology in depth. Tours of local research facilities will provide a broader picture of the importance of such research efforts in the "real-world". Information regarding potential career paths will be discussed and guidance provided. The Summer Institute is a multidisciplinary training effort which will be jointly taught by ISU faculty from the computational and biological sciences.

Intellectual focus. The guiding theme of the summer institute is "training through research". Thus, the participants will join active research groups at ISU and pursue novel but realistic research projects. The modules in the Short Course are designed to cover many of the basic methods in computational and systems biology as well as to introduce subjects of current research interest by the faculty. Guest lectures will be arranged to provide complementary views from medicine, drug design, and bioimaging. Throughout the teaching modules we emphasize the consistent practice of starting with a biologically motivated question, formulating the problem in terms of computational and statistical models, implementing practical algorithms for computation, comparing the results with database back-ends and completing this cycle with biological interpretation and refined problem formulation.

Organizational structure. Dr. Robert Jernigan will be responsible for the overall coordination of the Short Course and summer training program. The Core Faculty and one of the Teaching Assistants will serve as the Organizing Committee for the Short Course. Staff of the Baker Center will provide administrative support. For the formal course work, the Core Faculty will be supported by an extended faculty consisting of other members of the ISU bioinformatics and computational biology program.

E-mail: mjmccunn@iastate.edu
URL: http://www.bioinformatics.iastate.edu/BBSI/

Copyright © 2002 Iowa State University
All Rights Reserved