AMIA’s First Annual Summit for Translational Bioinformatics

In 2005, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the US National Institutes of Health, wrote “At no other time has the need for a robust, bidirectional information flow between basic and translational scientists been so necessary.” Clearly evident in Dr. Zerhouni’s quote is the role biomedical informatics needs to play in the future of translational medicine.

While this call for Translational Bioinformaticians was issued by none other than the Director of the NIH, and while Translational Bioinformatics is one of AMIA’s major domains, there is not currently a national annual conference or symposium for the presentation and discussion of research work in Translational Bioinformatics.

In response to this need, AMIA is sponsoring the First Annual Summit for Translational Bioinformatics to be held March 10-12, 2008 at the InterContinental Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, California.

Dr. Atul Butte will be chairing the scientific program committee, and is in charge of the summit’s content. Other BMIR researchers, Drs. Mark Musen, Daniel Rubin, Russ Altman and Amar Das, will be leading panels and presenting research.

For more information, or to register, please download a brochure or see their site.

Highlights of the Summit

We have 11 panels, over 50 posters, and nearly 30 peer-reviewed papers being presented during the Summit.

We begin on the morning of March 10 with three parallel tutorials:
One tutorial, presented by leaders of two of the seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs), will detail how to get a successfully funded collaborative R01 with the NCBCs.

Other tutorials include an Introduction to Translational Bioinformatics, and an introduction to the bioinformatics tools developed by Multiscale Analysis of Cellular and Genomic Networks (MAGNET), one of the seven NCBCs.

The Summit continues with a Keynote Presentation from Dr. Alan Krensky, new Director of the Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives(OPASI) and Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Krensky was recently featured in both Nature (448:406) and Science (317:887), for his new leadership role in determining the next-generation of trans-NIH and Roadmap initiatives.

Panels

Panels represent many national bioinformatics initiatives, including the Immune Tolerance Network, Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), and caBIG.
We even have the leaders of all seven NCBCs presenting on a single panel!

Papers

Some of the exciting papers being presented include work on finding aging-related biomarkers from analysis of national epidemiological data sets, metadata mapping from caBIG, and methods to prioritize genes within linkage regions.

Scientific Program Committee:

* Atul Butte, Chair (Stanford University) * Yves Lussier, Track Chair (University of Chicago) * Marco Ramoni, Track Chair (Harvard Medical School) * Indra Neil Sarkar, Track Chair (Marine Biological Laboratory) * Olga Troyanskaya, Track Chair (Princeton University) * Riccardo Bellazzi (University of Pavia) * Howard Bilofsky (University of Pennsylvania) * Maricel Kann (University of Maryland) * Lucila Ohno-Machado (Harvard Medical School) * Eitan Rubin (Ben-Gurion University) * Andrey Rzhetsky (University of Chicago) * Josh Stuart (University of California, Santa Cruz) * Yao Sun (University of California, San Francisco) * Hong Yu (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)