8/10/2008

GRIB organizes the Barcelona School on Biomedical Informatics (16th-20th February 2009)

The Barcelona school on biomedical informatics, is going to be held at the Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (PRBB) premises in February 16th to 20th 2009. It is an activity targetted at early stage researchers in the field of translational bioinformatics or biomedical informatics.

In its first edition, the school will be based on the computational tools developed within the framework of two FP6 STREP projects that will be about to finnish: QosCosGrid (http://www.qoscosgrid.eu) and BioBridge (http://www.biobridge.eu). BSBMI09 aims at becoming a meeting point for translational bioinformatics, putting innovation as the main objective of the school. The students will be divided into interdisciplinary groups in order to face a series of selected cases for which integration of basic and clinical research will become a key aspect in the near future, in our way to the long expected personalized helthcare. The school structure consists in plenary lectures and tutorials by experts in the different tools during the morning sessions and group work during the afternoon. Ground on the success of the past INFOBIOMED training challenges (http://www.infobiomed.org), we expect that the origin and background differences within each group, despite the obvious diversity in language and scientific perception, show the way to achieve integrated answers to the different posted biomedical problems. Dr. Jordi Villà i Freixa, responsible for this activity, is also the coordinator of the official Msc program on Bioinformatics for Health Sciences, some of which students will also participate in the school along with external students. Collaboration of the Institut Municipal d’Investigació Mèdica (IMIM – Hospital del Mar) and the Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (PRBB) ensures the success of the logistics. Finally, the contribution of the Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática (INB) and the RETIC COMBIOMED ensures a wide complementary scope of this pioneering school.

The school will include plenary conferences that are open to everyone and that will take place at the at the conference hall of the PRBB. They are the following:

Plenary Lecture 1 - Tuesday February 17 at 8:45am

“Bioinformatics Resources for Genomic Studies: the INB case”

Dr. David G. Pisano, CNIO - INB (Spain)

Plenary Lecture 2 – Wednesday February 18 at 8:45am

“Complex Chronic Disease.What's the problem?”

Dr. Francesco Falciani, University of Birmingham(UK)

Plenary Lecture 3 – Wednesday February 18 at 9:45am

“Metabolic basis of complex diseases”

Dr. Marta Cascante, Universitat de Barcelona (Spain)

Plenary Lecture 4 – Thursday February 19 at 8:45am

“Pharmacoinformatics”

Dr. Ferran Sanz, UPF (Spain)