Women & Minorities Dominate 12th International Biocomplexity and Biodesign Summer School Again!
The 12th International Biocomplexity Summer School, sponsored by the NSF and co-sponsored by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, was held at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, June 23- June 29, 2013. This summer school was a continuation of previous summer schools. Thirty students and seven faculty attended the 12th summer school. The NSF and the IEEE EMBS co-sponsored 26 of the 30 students.
The summer school was an excellent learning, teaching, and brain-storming platform for students, post-docs, young researchers, and summer school faculty. It provided students the opportunity to personally meet with leaders in the field while enjoying a pleasant location.
Jonathan Bernard of Columbia and Ana Enriquez of the University of Arizona led the summer school panel to discuss research concepts presented during the week, educational and career concerns for students in these fields, and provide suggestions for future summer schools.Karin Wang of Cornell University delivered the student banquet address.
Undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and mathematics who are interested in pursuing research in biology, biomolecular engineering, and bio-engineering will greatly benefit from these discussions since the summer school provided exceptional insights into the fundamental challenges facing Biomedical Science and Engineering. Six distinguished faculty gave these lectures, including Profs. Shankar Subramaniam of UCSD, David Fenstermacher of the Moffitt Cancer Center, Roberto Guzman of University of Arizona, May Wang of Georgia Tech/Emory, Anjelica Gonzalez of Yale and Sergey Shevkoplyas of Tulane. The Keynote address was delivered by Ted Berger of USC on "Engineering Memories: Identifying Neural Codes and Neural Coding Processes Necessary for the Recovery and Enhancement of Memory Formation".
We believe that the summer school will stimulate interdisciplinary research and collaboration among engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and medical researchers that will help understand complex biological systems, and open new directions in biomedical research and its applications.
I also would like to thank Dr. Kaiming Ye of the NSF for his support, help, and encouragement.
Metin Akay
Chair and Organizer
International Summer School on Biocomplexity and Biodesign: from Gene to System©
Metin Akay
Webmaster:
Andrei Dragomir
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Cullen College of Engineering
University of Houston
email: adragomi@central.uh.edu