Computational systems biology is a groundbreaking research area that seeks to use tools from engineering systems theory to understand the holistic functioning of a complex biological system. Translation of such knowledge into medicine is revolutionizing and will continue to revolutionize disease diagnosis and prognosis, medical therapy, disease prevention, drug discovery, and drug design. The objective of this project is to seek student travel support from NSF for the IEEE Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics, or GENSIPS, a workshop sponsored annually by the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Intellectual merit Our goals for GENSIPS13 are: 1) to address the systems biology issues in the emerging "omics" fields of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, especially the next-generation sequencing technologies (which facilitate parallel and much faster sequencing of DNA or RNA); and 2) to significantly increase the participation from the Signal Processing society, and the computer science, biostatistics, and biological science communities. The theme of GENSIPS13 will be next generation sequencing and systems biology applied to cancer. We will be inviting expert plenary speakers from the cancer research and genome research fields. To broaden the reach of the scientific work presented in the meeting, accepted papers will be published in the IEEE Conference Proceedings and selected ones in special issues in high profile journals.
Broader Impact Another important mission of GENSIPS13 is to promote the participation of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, especially women and minority students, and foster student education on systems biology. GENSIPS13 will provide travel awards to qualified graduate students, whose papers are deemed to be of high quality. Specifically, 20-30% of the awards will be allocated to encourage women and minority students to participate and submit papers to GENSIPS13.
One of the goals of the GENSIPS'13 conference was to promote the participation of graduate students and post doctoral researchers, especially women and minority students, and to foster student education in systems biology. The goal of this project was to provide travel awards to qualified graduate students, whose papers were deemed to be of high quality. The funds from this project were used to make eleven student travel awards to enable the awardees to attend the conference and present their results.The students supported are: Anwoy Kumar Mohanty (Texas A & M University (TAMU) ), Belhassen Bayar (Rowan University), Mario Flores (University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) ), Noah Berlow (Texas Tech University (TTU) ), Osama Arshad (TAMU), Po-Yen Wu (Georgia Institute of Technoloy), Qian Wan (TTU), Rajani Varghese (TAMU), Rolando Olivares (TAMU), Si Li (University of Southern Mississippi) and Xiadong Cui (UTSA). The total project funds were evenly distributed among the eleven awardees. As outlined above, the students receiving these awards came from six different universities. Furthermore, we note that at least one of the awards was given to a woman graduate student and one of the universities involved was a predominantly minority one. Thus we did have a good degree of success in achieving our original objectives.
