Biomedical informatics professor to chair session at national biocomputing conference

Assistant professor Graciela Gonzalez, of ASU’s Department of Biomedical Informatics has been selected as a leading session chair for the 2013 Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing conference.

The session, titled “Text and Data Mining for Biomedical Discovery,” aims to serve as a unique forum to discuss novel approaches to text and data mining methods that respond to specific scientific questions, enabling predictions that integrate a variety of data sources and can potentially impact scientific discovery.

The prestigious conference will bring together top researchers from North America, the Asian Pacific nations, Europe and around the world to exchange research results and address open issues in all aspects of computational biology From 20 entries, only six were chosen to represent trending areas of research in biocomputing for the conference.

The session will bring together researchers with a strong text or data mining background to collaborate with bench scientists for the deployment of integrative approaches in translational bioinformatics.

Topics of interest to be discussed include gene prioritization, binding site prediction and gene/protein function prediction, among others.

Session co-chairs also include Maricel G. Kann, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Jieping Ye, associate BMI professor; Casey Greene, postdoctoral researcher at the Lewis-Sigler Institute at Princeton University; and Robert J. Leaman, computer science and engineering student at ASU.