The 10th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Health Informatics (ACMBCB2019), the flagship conference of the ACM SIGBio (Special Interest Group in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics), will be held in Niagara Falls, NY, on September 7-10, 2019. It is the premier dissemination forum for interdisciplinary research linking computer science, mathematics, statistics, biology, bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, and health informatics. Its mission is to support advanced research, training, and outreach. It brings together superb researchers, practitioners, and students from around the world to promote novel scientific findings in bioscience and to deliver new knowledge for societal impact. The past few decades have seen tremendous growth in the scale and complexity of biological and medical data including recent mainstream recognition of big data challenges. However, the development of synergy in bioinformatics, computational biology, and health informatics research has been difficult. Thus, it is important to train new researchers to achieve this synergy. This award will support up to 15 early-career professionals (students and recently graduated post-doctoral fellows) to share their travel costs to the conference. Senior researchers will serve as mentors to these early-career professionals to improve bioinformatics, computational biology, and health informatics community building. This award aims to increase the participation of students and recently graduated post-docs; train the next generation of researchers and educators in computer science, biological science, biomedical science and other related areas; and broaden diversity in bioinformatics and computational biology.
The ACMBCB2019 conference will showcase leading-edge research on new technologies and techniques around gathering, processing, analyzing, and modeling of data and information for a variety of scientific, clinical, and healthcare applications from bench to bedside. It will provide activities such as workshops, tutorials, oral sessions, and poster sessions for researchers from different disciplines to interact, to discuss, and to collaborate. To be selected for participation, early-career professionals will need to submit a short research proposal containing Intellectual Merit, Broader Impact, and supporting information such as a resume and a letter of support from their advisors. A committee consisting of experienced researchers will review the research proposals and select the awardees with the support from the conference organizers. In addition, this award will enable ACMBCB2019 to expand "Women in Bioinformatics" to strongly encourage participation from more underrepresented groups by inviting senior researchers to share their experience and wisdom in career development, and to serve as mentors to facilitate early-career professional groups with the goal to continually build the community throughout the year.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
