This award will provide support for The 2017 International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) to be held August 6-12, 2017 at the Squires Student Center in Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia. This conference will host three keynote talks (one hour), twenty plenary talks (30 minutes), 24 parallel sessions (each with four 20 minutes contributed talks) and two poster sessions. The conference is designed to stimulate exciting interdisciplinary research in systems and synthetic biology, while also supporting systems biology education and the development of young researchers in the field. The prospective attendees are expected to come from a broad spectrum of disciplines and career stages. Research talks will be given by both established experts in the field and young researchers alike. ICSB 2017 will provide career-building opportunities for young and early-career scientists, as well as a forum for students and researchers in related fields to consider how best to overcome current challenges.in systems biology education.
Biological sciences are currently undergoing a historic transition from a reductionist paradigm to an integrative "systems" paradigm. For the past two decades, computational and mathematical modeling of complex molecular regulatory systems have played pivotal roles in this transition. Today, interdisciplinary collaborations that combine both in silico and in vivo experiments are emphasized and encouraged. However, the rapid growth of systems biology presents great challenges in bringing together experimentalists and modelers to overcome the barriers separating the conventional disciplines. To facilitate this transition, it is critical to train a new generation of interdisciplinary researchers with the abilities to combine experimental and theoretical approaches to biological systems. This conference will create a platform for exchanging ideas and fostering collaborations between experimentalists and theoreticians, and provide a rare opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and young researchers to interact with and learn from leading scientists in the field. ICSB 2017 will also maximize the visibility of talented young researchers by selecting the best abstracts for oral presentation in parallel sessions and by highlighting the poster sessions that showcase everyone?s research.
This project is funded by the Systems and Synthetic Biology Program in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences.
