Stanford Report, August 9, 2006

Public invited to biocomputing panel

Want to know how scientists are using computers to devise new ways of diagnosing and treating disease? You can ask the nation's top experts during an Aug. 15 panel discussion at Memorial Auditorium.

The panel is part of the fifth annual Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference, which takes place Aug. 14-18. Participants will address computational issues in biological pathways, biomolecular engineering and medical imaging.

The panelists include the directors of seven biomedical computation centers created by the National Institutes of Health, two of which are at Stanford: the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, led by professor Mark Musen, MD, PhD, and the National Center for Physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures, led by professor Russ Altman, MD, PhD.

Musen will deliver a keynote address about his work on ontologies—computer-friendly ways of structuring knowledge.

The 7:45 p.m. panel discussion is free and open to the public. For more information or to register for the conference, please visit http://www.lifesciencessociety.org/CSB2006/index2006.html.