18th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Biology held in Pittsburgh

The 18th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) was held in Pittsburgh April 2-5, jointly hosted by the Lane Center for Computational Biology and the University of Pittsburgh Department of Computational and Systems Biology.  The conference drew in over 300 attendees from 21 countries. In addition to the main conference, the Fourth Annual RECOMB Satellite Workshop of Massively Parallel Sequencing (RECOMB-Seq) and the Fifth RECOMB Satellite Workshop on Bioinformatics Education (RECOMB-BE) drew an additional 71 and 44 participants, respectively.  Lane Center staff members Thom Gulish and Nichole Merritt handled the major part of the organizational responsibilities for all three meetings.

Professors Russell Schwartz and Carl Kingsford served as Conference Chair and Posters Chair, respectively, and Professors Ziv Bar-Joseph, Carl Kingsford and Seyoung Kim all served on the Program Committee. President Suresh gave the Opening Remarks and Welcome on the first day of the conference, and his enthusiasm for computational biology was evident in his speech.  Professor Tom Mitchell gave a very well-received Keynote Lecture.

The Lane Center’s research groups were well represented at the main meeting, with one Highlights presentation, one proceedings paper presentation, and 13 posters; many of these posters were presented by undergraduates having their first experience at a large scientific meeting.