This International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) 2014 is the eighteenth in a series of international conferences in computational molecular biology. Computational biology has become one of the essential tools of modern biological research and RECOMB is one of the oldest and most prestigious conferences in the field. It is arguably the premiere meeting for work on innovative computer science applied to biology.
The meeting will be held in Pittsburgh, PA on April 2-5, 2014, jointly hosted by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Funding is requested specifically for student travel awards to support U.S.-based students presenting work at the meeting. While every effort is being made to keep the meeting affordable, cost can nonetheless be an obstacle for potential attendees, especially student attendees. These travel awards will cover registration, hotel, and travel costs for a selected group of student presenters, competitively chosen based on the caliber of their work as assessed by the conference program committee and the individual merit and need of the students. Special attention will be given to women and minority researchers.
The conference series aims at attracting research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology, including work on analyzing genomes and other molecular sequences, understanding the interaction of complicated systems that underlie biological function, working with molecular structures that make up these systems, making sense of biological image data, and advancing the computer models and algorithms needed for all of these tasks. The meeting will feature a prestigious group of keynote speakers, oral presentations chosen from submitted papers by a program committee of top researchers in the field, and poster presentations selected from submitted abstracts. In addition, the meeting will offer ample opportunities for one-on-one interactions between active researchers and students. The proposed travel awards will particularly extend this opportunity to U.S.-based students who might otherwise lack the opportunity to participate in the meeting.
The meeting and proposed travel fellowships will have particular value for educational purposes, creating a unique training opportunity for computational biology students who might not otherwise be able to present work at a prestigious international meeting. Particular invitation will be made to women and minority applicants, who remain underrepresented in computational work in general.
This award covered student travel grants for attendance at the RECOMB International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology, one of the leading conferences in the field of computational biology. The 18th instance of the meeting, RECOMB 2014, was held in Pittsburgh, PA in April 2-5, 2014. The award specifically provided $1,000 travel fellowships to each of 12 awardees, all students at US-based institutions of higher learning, to offset their costs of attending the conference. Each of the winners was presenting their scientific work at the meeting or at one of its Satellite meetings, including eight students presenting conference papers on their work, one giving a highlights talk on a previously published paper, and three presenting posters on their work. The travel awards provided a unique opportunity for these students to attend an international conference in their field where they could share their work, learn about the other cutting-edge work in the area, and have the opportunity to network with other students and leading international researchers in computational biology. The scientific program facilitated these interactions through ample discussion sessions and an informal opening reception and conference banquet. The main meeting was held jointly with two Satellite Conferences, the RECOMB-Seq conference on computational methods for next-generation sequencing data, and the RECOMB-Bioinformatics Education Conference focused on improving teaching of computational biology to diverse student populations. In addition to having a platform to present their work, students awardees got to participate in a vibrant scientific program consisting of six keynote talks by leading international scientists (Ian Baldwin, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology; Atul Butte, Stanford University; James Collins, Boston University; Trey Ideker, U.C. San Diego; Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University; and Sarah Tishkoff, University of Pennsylvania), 35 talks on original scientific research papers published in the conference proceedings, and 8 highlight talks on particularly meritorious scientific papers published in the preceding year. These contributions were selected by an expert program committee from 135 submitted proceedings papers and 48 submitted highlights papers, ensuring a highly selective program. Intellectual merit: The award promoted exchange of ideas at the cutting edge of computational biology research by facilitating attendance of twelve student authors to present their work at the meeting. RECOMB is one of the oldest and most prestigious conferences in computational biology, arguably the most prestigious forum for work on advancing computational methods for biological research. Broader impacts: The award has helped to facilitate workforce development in computational biology by promoting opportunities for talented students to gain exposure for their work, to attend an international scientific conference while it was in the US, and to network with the top researchers in the field. In addition, the award supported a diverse group of travel fellows by a variety of measures, with a group that was one third women, included members of underrepresented groups, and spanned universities from ten U.S. states.
