Events

Institute for Systems Biology Directors
Bill Bowes, Leighton Read, Lou Lange, Stephen Graham and
Lee Hood
President and Co-Founder

Invite you and a guest to join us for breakfast and conversation with

Nitin Baliga
ISB Senior Vice President and Director

presenting

Strange Microbes and Complex Diseases:
Different Problems, One Approach

RSVP     Sissy Bouchard      206.732.1211

Abstract:

Microbes have figured out how to colonize nearly every environmental niche on our planet. The outstanding question is whether we can mine gene networks for strange and interesting chemistries from different microbes and recombine these into integrated solutions for our own problems. It turns out that the biological complexity that needs to be tackled to uncover microbial networks requires the same strategies that are needed to understand complex diseases. In the end, the predictive models that are necessary to redirect the evolution of these biological systems - microbes or complex diseases - will be a center piece for the future of medicine and biotechnology.

About Our Speaker:

Dr. Nitin Baliga is a Professor at ISB, where he also serves as Senior Vice President and Director. He did his early schooling in Mumbai, India, where he received a B.Sc. in Microbiology (1992) from Ruia College. He also has a M.Sc. in Marine Biotechnology (1994) from Goa University, and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2000). Dr. Baliga’s graduate work was supported by two highly coveted awards from the Central Government of India including the Department of Biotechnology studentship, as well as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research fellowship. Work in Dr. Baliga’s work has been featured in The Scientist, Genome Web, Wired magazine, Genetic Engineering News, Ars Technica, Xconomy, and Nature Methods, among many others. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NASA, Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense. He is the Section Editor of BMC Systems Biology, serves on scientific advisory boards of numerous academic and industrial organizations, and has been instrumental in research program planning for the NSF, US Army, ARPA-E and DOE., Dr. Baliga is also actively engaged in bringing innovative inquiry based curriculum on current science concepts to high schools throughout the United States. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Alvin J. Thompson award in recognition of his contributions to HS education.

Valerie Logan and her husband, Lee Hood, have always believed in quality science education for our children. Valerie's vision to create long-term partnerships between the scientific community and K-12 educators blossomed into the Institute for System Biology’s Center for Inquiry Science (CIS).

We invite you to celebrate Valerie and the groundbreaking work that the CIS team continues to accomplish as educators recognize the urgency to incorporate STEM disciplines – science, technology, engineering and math – into school curriculum.

While there is no ticket price for the luncheon, there will be a suggested donation of $150 per person.

Questions? Please Contact:
Nick Newcombe, Director of Major Giving
206.732.1287 | c  206.777.5864

Our emcee: Patti Payne!

The Payne Group: Communicating/Connecting, Principal
Patti Payne serves as principal of her own public affairs/community relations business, The Payne Group, guiding clients in business strategies for maximum effectiveness, crisis communications, community relations, and other related issues. Payne is also columnist for Puget Sound Business Journal, and a 28-year radio personality and news anchor/correspondent. She was public affairs director for Paul Allen during the development and opening of Experience Music Project. She is a sought-after public speaker and emcees dozens of major charity auctions and events each year.

Thanks to Our Presenting Sponsor:
Sabey Corporation

Also Sponsored in part by Integrated Diagnostics, Touchstone, Amgen and BNBuilders

The 2012 Systems Bioinformatics Workshop will be held at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle on September 10th & 11th. The workshop will be a two day meeting featuring talks, tutorials and a hackathon. We invite your participation.

Bioinformatics software is an essential tool for understanding complex biological systems. Bringing together engineers and scientists building software for systems biology, the goal of the meeting is to inspire and inform the creation of fluid environments for analysis of biological data. Themes for this year's workshop include networks, visualization, and software architecture for collaborative research computing.

We have some exciting speakers lined up, with a few more in the works.

Speakers
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Max Franz
Software Engineer and User Interface Designer, Cytoscape Web

Michael Kellen
Director of Technology at Sage Bionetworks

Martin Krzywinski
creator of data visualizations Circos and Hiveplots

Mike Smoot
Chief Architect of the Cytoscape project

James Taylor
the Galaxy project

Matt Wood
Amazon Web Services

Tutorials
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Cloud Computing
Graph data storage with Neo4j
Regulatory network inference
Visualization and D3

Registration and more information can be found on the workshop website
http://gaggle.systemsbiology.net/workshop2012/

2012 Course Description
This intensive one-week course will introduce and develop skills and concepts necessary for comprehension and application of modern systems-biology approaches to research problems. The course will focus on a central research problem, selected in part by the course participants, implemented with computational and bench techniques, and analyzed with emphasis on global applicability to other problems. Sessions of the course will focus on the application for specific systems-biology technologies in the context of the theme problem. Each student should be able to develop, as a result of this course, a research outline that could form the core of a systems-based grant application.

View full course description >>