N5. EDUCATION AND OUTREACH CORE N5A. CANCER SYSTEMS BIOLOGY EDUCATION AT MIT The MIT Tumor Cell Networks Center devotes high priority to training students and postdocs at the interface engaging cancer biology with computational modeling approaches. While our current faculty members are active in this emerging field, the future of cancer biology more critically depends on educating a new generation of scientists to lead advances in this field. Our strategy is to encourage student/postdoc trainees to have joint mentorship from supervisors whose core expertise straddle the computational-biological interface. We endeavor to attract students/postdocs from both molecular/cellular biology and computerscience/ engineering and place them together in joint research projects with faculty members from these two broad areas. N5B. OUTREACH The ICBP grant has had a significant impact within the MIT campus community by catalyzing interactions between the systems biology and cancer biology communities. One example of the new communication between these communities was the choice to focus the annual MIT Center for Cancer Research Symposium on the """"""""Systems Biology of Cancer"""""""" in 2008. The program for this Symposium (with over 1,000 attendees) featured outstanding investigators from a number of institutions across the USA and Canada bringing integrative systems approaches to bear on basic and clinical science facets in fundamental understanding, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. A striking manifestation of our marrying the cancer and systems biology communities was the evolution of the MIT Center for Cancer Research into the new Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research - doubled in size, now including a roughly equal number of members from MIT science and engineering departments.
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