The primary goal of the third multidisciplinary research workshop again is to further advance the emerging field of self-assembly of peptide and protein systems. Recently, this field has been actively pursued in several broad research areas and undergone a significant growth since the first workshop in 1999. This workshop will again bring researchers together from various backgrounds that would have never met otherwise. This is the third workshop to cover such a broad spectrum of fields, including biology, chemistry, physics, protein science, materials science, various engineering disciplines, mathematics, computational bioinformatics, and medical science, unified under a common theme. Biology is reaching the limit of what it can accomplish without the influence of other fields, especially mathematics, bioinformatics, computer science, engineering, and materials science. These disciplines will again bring new technologies, techniques, and innovations to biology, allowing biologists to approach previously unanswerable questions. It is important now, more than ever, that biologists collaborate with scientists from all fields in order to allow biology to reach new heights in the coming decades. ? ? It is tremendously exciting to bring biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians and various engineers under one roof. A cross-disciplinary workshop will undoubtedly generate a great deal of novel ideas and diverse collaborations. It is believed that these unconventional collaborations will produce breakthrough insights into many unsolved problems in biology. This workshop will become an incubator for the development of new innovative technologies. As Francis Crick best put it: """"""""In Nature hybrid species are usually sterile, but in science the reverse is often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile, whereas if a scientific discipline remains too pure it usually wilts."""""""" ? ?
