Program

DAY ONE
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 22
12:00-12:40 Registration, Lunch and Poster Setup
Session One Chair: Ron Shamir
12:40-12:45 Opening Remarks
12:45-1:00 Pavel Pevzner (UC San Diego) The Challenges in Bioinformatics Education: A Preview of Topics for Discussion at RECOMB BE
1:00-1:35 David Haussler (UCSC) Rearranging Genes
1:35-2:10 Tandy Warnow (UT Austin) Phylogeny Estimation: Why It Is "Hard", and How to Design Methods with Good Performance
2:10-2:50 Discussion Panel I: Lior Pachter (moderator), David Haussler, Michael Lynch, Pavel Pevzner, Adam Siepel, Tandy Warnow
 
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What is bioinformatics: science, engineering or service? Should it be taught as science, engineering or trade?

What is the right background for a bioinformatics graduate degree? Biology? Computer science? Mathematics? Bioengineering? Should future applicants to bioinformatics graduate programs master all these skills?

The best bioinformatics education: undergraduate, graduate, or postgraduate? Should we start early or late?

The split personality of bioinformatics: systems biology, bioengineering, computational biology: Why, and what next? What are the implications for bioinformatics education?
 
2:50-3:10 Coffee Break
Session Two Chair: Pavel Pevzner
3:10-3:25 Ran Libeskind-Hadas (Harvey Mudd) A New First-Year Undergraduate Course Integrating Biology and Computer Science
3:25-4:00 Adam Siepel (Cornell) Genomic Archaeology: Extracting Ancient Human History from Genome Sequences by Computer
4:00-4:35 Russell Schwartz (Carnegie Mellon) Principles of Genetic Regulatory Network Inference
4:35-4:55 Coffee Break
Session Three Chair: Tandy Warnow
4:55-5:30 Ron Shamir (Tel Aviv University) From DNA Chips to Cancer Treatment
5:30-6:20 Discussion Panel II: Ron Shamir and Jacques Cohen (moderators), Russell Schwartz, Bahar Taneri, Alexander Schliep, Tandy Warnow, Alexander Hoffman
 
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What is the difference between bioinformatics and systems biology? Is systems biology really a new discipline? What are the implications for bioinformatics/systems biology education?

What is the educational core of Bioinformatics? What is the educational core of Systems Biology?

Women in bioinformatics: another gender gap, or a model for other disciplines to follow?

Is There Room For Ethics Within Bioinformatics Education?
 
6:20-8:00 Dinner Reception and Poster Session
   
DAY TWO
SUNDAY MORNING, MAY 23
8:00-9:00 Breakfast
Session One Chair: Russell Schwartz
9:00-9:35 Aviv Regev (Broad Institute) Transcriptional Regulatory Circuits: predicting numbers from alphabets
9:35-10:10 Lior Pachter (UC Berkeley) What Is the Neighbor-Joining Algorithm?
10:10-10:45 Dan Gusfield (UC Davis) Why Algorithmic Efficiency Matters in Bioinformatics: An Introduction to Dynamic Programming in Sequence Alignment
10:45-11:05 Coffee Break
Session Two Chair: Dan Gusfield
11:05-11:40 Eugene Koonin (Natl Ctr for Biotechnology Information) The Tree (or Forest?) of Life in the Age of Genomics
11:40-11:55 Jeff Elhai (Virginia Commonwealth) Humans, Computers, and the Route to Biological Insights: Regaining Our Capacity for Surprise
11:55-12:35 Discussion Panel III: Pavel Pevzner (moderator), Jeff Elhai, Dan Gusfield, Eugene Koonin, Lior Pachter, Aviv Regev, Steven Wasserman, Ran Lebeskind-Hadas, Eliot Bush.
 
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Should life-sciences undergraduates be required to learn bioinformatics? How to teach bioinformatics to life science (and medicine) students?

Should biology students also cover Algorithms and Statistics 101, or should they be taught a "bioinformatics for future presidents" course without any formulas?

If bioinformatics should be a required course in biology, what courses can be removed from the current biology curriculum?

Should medical students take bioinformatics? In view of the next-generation sequencing revolution and fast proliferation of the personal genomics companies, should all medical students take a bioinformatics course?
 
12:35-1:20 Lunch
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, MAY 23
Session One Chair: Lior Pachter
1:20-1:55 Olga Troyanskaya (Princeton) Building "Google" for Biology: Answering Specific Biological Questions Based on Diverse Genomic Data
1:55-2:30 Glenn Tesler (UC San Diego) An Introduction to the Poisson Distribution and Haldane's Model of Crossovers
2:30-2:50 Tiffany Williams (Texas A&M) Computational Approaches for Constructing Majority Consensus Trees
2:50-3:10 Coffee Break
Session Two Chair: Olga Troyanskaya
3:10-3:45 Itzhak Pilpel (Weizmann Institute) Codon-tRNA Adaptation: A Code for Determining Translation Efficiency
3:45-4:00 Ricardo Gonzalez Mendez (University of Puerto Rico) Assisting Bioinformatics Efforts at Minority Institutions: Efforts and Outcomes of an NIH-Funded Program
4:00-4:15 Bahar Taneri (Eastern Mediterranean University) Is There Room for Ethics Within Bioinformatics Education? A Survey Of Ethics Components Within Bioinformatics Curricula
4:15-4:35 Jian Ma (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Understanding Structural Genomic Changes: Biological Questions and Computational Challenges
4:35-5:10 Discussion Panel IV: Tandy Warnow (moderator), Glenn Tesler, Jian Ma, Ricardo Gonzalez Mendez, Itzhak Pilpel, Olga Troyanskaya, Tiffany Williams
 
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Building a curriculum in a nascent field: What can we learn from the adolescent experience of other fields?

Undergraduate research experience in bioinformatics: learning from past experience. There are dozens of bioinformatics textbooks: Do we need more? There is still no "standard" systems biology textbook – is it a symptom or just a delay?

Should we educate bioinformaticians to do wet experiments?

Bioinformatics wiki resources: Can they be built from various bioinformatics courses?
 
5:10-5:20 Pavel Pevzner and Ron Shamir Closing Remarks