A NIH-NSF BBSI Summer Institute in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (SIBCB) is planned at Iowa State University (ISU). The faculty are 10 principal scientists with diverse areas of expertise, from computer science, mathematics, statistics, genomics, informatics, biophysics and structural biology. Summaries of recent accomplishments in genomics, methods in bioinformatics and computational biology, and applications to genetics and molecular biology will be presented in a two week intensive instructional course, including programming instruction and computer laboratory sessions. The participants will be 15 students supported by this grant and an additional group of 11 students from industrial laboratories plus two high school teachers, who will broaden the experience for the core students and provide additional funds to enhance the course. Following the course, the 15 NIH-NSF supported students will select among research projects and spend eight weeks developing their own research projects; thus the SIBCB will last 10 weeks. These projects will span the range from sequence analysis to comparative genomics to protein homology modeling to simulations of organism growth. An organized "job fair" will include presentations by the faculty. Immediately before embarking on their research projects, the students will receive an introduction to Bioethics. The research period will present the students with tools to comprehend and begin significant research projects with a broad, integrated approach to complex biology.
