This award supports participation of students and members of underrepresented groups to attend the annual Conference on Computational Systems Bioinformatics, to be held in Palo Alto, CA August 14-18, 2006 and in San Diego, CA in August 2007. While reflecting state of the art research at all biological scales in order to capture the emergent properties of living cells, the CSB meeting exists in a computer science discipline framework, with rigorous peer review and a major publication from each year's session. The dialogue among engineers, physical scientists, biological scientists, and biomedical scientists, over the years of the CSB has been exceptional; CSB serves as a bridge to the quantitative sciences. Underpinning many societal advances, computing and information technology enable human beings to acquire, store, process, and interpret enormous amounts of information, and thus provide essential tools for understanding biology. The conference serves to enable biology to have a more immediate societal impact through both the science itself and the introduction of young quantitative scientists to the challenges of biology. CSB Conferences were built and have been sustained to accelerate the introduction of engineers and quantitative scientists into the biological scientists through presenting the best biological discoveries in the context of the computing required, and through attracting a growing number of young scientists. CSB attracts a much larger audience of quantitative scientists and engineers than any of the other conferences at the interface, while maintaining a focus on presenting the most exciting biology through invited keynote talks each day and rigorous review to select other plenary presentations and also the poster sessions. The well edited publications coming out of CSB have also been important for world wide dissemination, and for public outreach.
