News

Contact: Nancy Jensen, SDSC, jensenn@sdsc.edu, 858-534-5039
http://ismb2000.sdsc.edu/

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO-Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman and Leroy Hood, a pioneer of the Human Genome Project, will be two of six keynote speakers at the Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2000), to be held at the University of California, San Diego, August 19-23, 2000.

ISMB 2000, a general forum for the latest developments in bioinformatics, is expected to draw nearly a thousand participants from all over the world. Topics include molecular structure, genomics, molecular sequence analysis, evolution, and phylogenetics. Special emphasis is placed on knowledge discovery from the modeling and simulation of complex biological systems. ISMB 2000 brings together scientists from the disciplines of computer science, molecular biology, mathematics, and statistics to discuss the development and application of advanced computational methods for biological problems.

In addition to Edelman and Hood, ISMB 2000 keynoters include Minoru Kanehisa of Kyoto University; J. Andrew McCammon of the University of California, San Diego; Gene Myers of Celera Genomics Corporation, and Harold A. Scheraga of Cornell University. The keynote talks will be given on August 20-22 at morning and afternoon conference sessions.

ISMB 2000 KEYNOTE TALKS

Gerald Edelman, The Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla, CA
How Matter Becomes Imagination: From Brain Dynamics to Consciousness

Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA
Globally Deciphering and Integrating Information Expressed by Living Organisms

Minoru Kanehisa, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Japan
Graph Comparison and Path Computation Methods for Predicting Molecular Networks from Genome Information

J. Andrew McCammon, Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego, CA
Dynamics of Molecular Recognition

Gene Myers, Celera Genomics Corporation, Rockville, MD
A Whole Genome Assembly of Drosophila and a Progress Report on the Human Genome

Harold A. Scheraga, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Ab Initio Folding of Proteins

The deadline for early registration to ISMB 2000 is June 30. For more information, see the ISMB 2000 Web site at http://ismb2000.sdsc.edu. Abstracts of the keynote speeches may be found at http://ismb2000.sdsc.edu/keynote.html.

The conference is co-chaired by Philip Bourne and Michael Gribskov, computational biologists at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "This conference is the showcase for computational biology, growing in size and visibility each year," Bourne said. "The growth is due to the increasing importance of computational biology and its impact on other disciplines."

In addition to keynote speeches and conference sessions, this year's conference also features a day of tutorials on August 19, poster sessions, software demonstrations, and two exhibit halls.

Two satellite conferences will be held in association with ISMB 2000: the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference and the Third Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting. Information about these is also available on the ISMB 2000 Web site.

ISMB 2000 is sponsored by the International Society of Computational Biology, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, the National Biomedical Computation Resource at SDSC, and the University of California, San Diego. For more information, see http://ismb2000.sdsc.edu/.