News

20 May, 2019 - Press release

A conference to promote women's research in computational biology

Barcelona Supercomputing Center, UPC and Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mèdiques organize the first Advances in Computational Biology conference will bring together researchers working on systems biology, omics technologies, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) with applications to biology from both the public and the private sectors. The conference will be held November 28-29 in La Pedrera (Barcelona).

Maria Jose Rementeria, Social Link Analytics group leader at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and one of the organizers, states: "One of the main purposes of the conference is to visualize and promote the research done by women scientists and for this reason all presenters will be women, although the conference is open to everyone. We want to create a space to foster collaborations between scientists, providing a unique opportunity to share ideas and build research networks".

The programme will include poster and oral presentations, as well as keynotes from leading scientists in the computational biology and HPC fields. The confirmed keynote speakers are Christine Orengo, group leader of Orengo Group at University College London, Natasa Przulj, group leader of the Life Sciences - Integrative Computational Network Biology at the BSC and Marie-Christine Sawley, director of the Exascale Lab at Intel.

The scientific sessions will be divided into three tracks: Learning from Biological Sequences, including population genomics, evolutionary genomics, systems biology, transcriptomics, sequence analysis and metagenomics; When Computational Biology meets Medicine, including biomedical applications, mutational landscapes and clinical genomics; and Machines Speeding up Research, including HPC, machine learning in the life sciences, imaging data analysis, dynamic simulations and algorithm development.

Furthermore, the participants will have the opportunity to interact personally with female leaders in the fields of IT, academic research and politics that support the conference.

The conference is organised by the Bioinfo4Women programme from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) with the collaboration of IMIM-UPF Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya· BarcelonaTech (UPC). It is an affiliate conference of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).