The first Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB-1) will be held January 3-6, 1996, in Hawaii. PSB-1 will bring together top researchers and educators, from the US, Asian Pacific nations, Europe and throughout the rest of the world, to exchange research results, teaching experiences and to address open issues in all aspects of computational biology. Replacing and extending the last three years of the Biotechnology Computing Track at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), PSB-1 will provide a forum for presentation and discussion on virtually all areas of computational biology with special emphasis this year in the following areas: molecular evolution, interactive molecular visualization, genome informatics and databases, protein structure analysis and prediction, population modeling, quantum/classical hybrid methods, biological control systems, protein design, internet tools and biocomputing education. PSB-1 is a genuinely interdisciplinary meeting, emphasizing the critical and difficult areas in both computer science and biology, with in-depth coverage of such areas as evolutionary inference, protein biophysics, advanced data representations, and high performance computing. The Biotechnology Computing Track of HICSS in previous years attracted researchers from more than 20 countries. Initial feedback from PSB-1 conference announcements suggest that participation at the new meeting will be just as diverse. No other computational biology meeting has greater international participation. To our knowledge, PSB's educational workshop is the first ever organized meeting on the teaching of computational biology. Course and curriculum development are at their formative stages. Many faculty are facing similar problems in this emerging and crucial area, yet there is a lack of published materials and no widely available gu idelines. A forum on educational issues at this time will significantly advance instruction in this field. The organizing committee is requesting funding in order to: (i) attract high caliber educators and researchers; (ii) attract educators and researchers who have recently become involved in course and curriculum development in computational biology; and (iii) fund graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, young faculty, and women or minorities, with preference shown to those who will be giving oral presentations or displaying posters.
