In response to PAR-06-041 NIH SUPPORT FOR CONFERENCES AND SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS, the UTORNL-KBRIN Bioinformatics Summit is proposed as an annual event held through a collaborative effort between the state of Tennessee and the commonwealth of Kentucky, specifically the University of Tennessee system, Oak Ridge National Labs, and the Kentucky Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network. There are four specific aims for creating such a summit: 1) plan and organize an annual conference to discuss current bioinformatics research; 2) create an environment conductive to increasing collaborative efforts across disciplines and institutions within Tennessee and Kentucky; 3) provide introductory tutorials and workshops for ? bioinformatics topics; and 4) enhance bioinformatics education and research by providing opportunities for undergraduate and graduate participation. In order to achieve these aims, the meeting will be held annually each spring and will be composed of scientific research symposia in three or four topic areas. Each of these scientific sessions will be led by a seminar from a leading national or international researcher in the field, along with talks from Tennessee and/or Kentucky researchers with interests in the area. In addition, a number of tutorials will be held on various topics such as microarray data analysis; sequence similarity searching; protein folding prediction; transcriptome analysis; proteomics analysis; and scientific databases. Posters sessions will be held as well to encourage the participation of students both at the undergraduate and graduate levels to present their work in a formal yet friendly environment. At the end of the funding period, researchers throughout both Kentucky and Tennessee should have gained a much better appreciation for the multidisciplinary field of bioinformatics. In addition, it is expected that a number of cross institutional and cross discipline collaborative relationships will be fostered due to overlapping research interests which would go unnoticed without the summit. The summit should have a significant impact on making researchers within Tennessee and Kentucky more competitive for future funding opportunities due to the synergy created from cross-discipline and cross-institutional collaborations. ? ? ?
