Hawaii Med School Conference Focuses on Systems Biology

Systems biology, the idea of using massive computing power and new knowledge of biology deriving from emerging fields like genomics and proteomics as well as traditional knowledge to get an overall view of biological systems, is rising on the agenda at the John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Leroy Hood, co-founder of the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle, and Marc Kirschner, chairman of the new Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, are among the systems biology notables that will speak at the second annual Hawaii BioScience Conference, which is slated to begin Sunday, June 25.

The conference will cover genomics and no doubt the emerging thought in systems biology as well as presentations from Nancy Cox, chief of the influenza branch of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on emerging infectious diseases and influenza pandemics.

Additionally, presentations will be provided by Ed Liu, the director of the Genome Institute of Singapore; Hiroshi Mizushima, director of bioinformatics at the National Cancer Center Research Institutes Center for Medical Genomics, and Stephen O'Brien, chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute, both speaking on topics related to genomics and medicine.

Further information is available at http://www.hibiosci.org/

We attended the initial conference in Hawaii last year and found the presentations to be powerful and the speakers – as well as the attendees – to be of the highest caliber, not to leave out the hospitality and organization of the hosts. Mahalo.