Final call for participation in the Summit on Translational Bioinformatics 2008

2008 FIRST ANNUAL SUMMIT ON TRANSLATIONAL BIOINFORMATICS

			  LAST CALL FOR PARTICIPATION


The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) is an  
organization of
3,500 health professionals committed to biomedical informatics who are
leaders, shaping the future of health information technology and its
application in the United States and 41 other nations since 1989.   
AMIA is
dedicated to the development and application of informatics in  
support of
patient care, teaching, research, and healthcare administration and  
public
policy.

In 2005, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the US National Institutes of
Health, wrote that "At no other time has the need for a robust,
bidirectional information flow between basic and translational  
scientists
been so necessary."  Clearly evident in Dr. Zerhouni's quote is the role
biomedical informatics needs to play in facilitating translational
medicine.  But while the call for Translational Bioinformaticians was
issued by none other than the Director of the NIH, and while  
Translational
Bioinformatics is one of AMIA's major domains of informatics, currently
there is no national annual conference or symposium for the presentation
and discussion of research work in Translational Bioinformatics.

In response to this need, AMIA is sponsoring the first Annual Summit for
Translational Bioinformatics to be held on March 10-12, 2008 at the
InterContinental Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, California.  The
International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is co-sponsoring
and is affiliated with this Summit.  This Summit marks the first time  
AMIA
and ISCB have collaborated on a conference.

AMIA defines Translational Bioinformatics as:

"...the development of storage, analytic, and interpretive methods to
optimize the transformation of increasingly voluminous biomedical data
into proactive, predictive, preventative, and participatory health.
Translational bioinformatics includes research on the development of  
novel
techniques for the integration of biological and clinical data and the
evolution of clinical informatics methodology to encompass biological
observations.  The end product of translational bioinformatics is newly
found knowledge from these integrative efforts that can be  
disseminated to
a variety of stakeholders, including biomedical scientists, clinicians,
and patients."

On behalf of the Scientific Program Committee, I would like to invite  
the
submission of manuscripts including scientific papers, posters, and
panels.  The deadline for submission is September 17, 2007.  We will
produce a Proceedings of the Summit and will upload the accepted
peer-reviewed papers into PubMedCentral and PubMed.

Summit web-site:
http://www.amia.org/meetings/stb08/index.asp

Call for Participation:
http://www.amia.org/meetings/stb08/call_invitation.asp

Submissions:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/amiatbs2008

Scientific Program Committee:

   * Atul Butte, Chair (Stanford University)
   * Yves Lussier, Track Chair (University of Chicago)
   * Marco Ramoni, Track Chair (Harvard Medical School)
   * Indra Neil Sarkar, Track Chair (Marine Biological Laboratory)
   * Olga Troyanskaya, Track Chair (Princeton University)
   * Riccardo Bellazzi (University of Pavia)
   * Howard Bilofsky (University of Pennsylvania)
   * Maricel Kann (University of Maryland)
   * Lucila Ohno-Machado (Harvard Medical School)
   * Eitan Rubin (Ben-Gurion University)
   * Andrey Rzhetsky (University of Chicago)
   * Josh Stuart (University of California, Santa Cruz)
   * Yao Sun (University of California, San Francisco)
   * Hong Yu (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

I do hope you will save the dates of March 10-12, 2008 and plan to  
travel
to San Francisco, California, to attend what we believe will be the  
first
of many meetings with a singular focus on Translational Bioinformatics.

Thanks,

-Neil.


--
Indra Neil Sarkar, PhD
Informatics Manager, MBLWHOI Library
Semantics Manager, EOL Biodiversity Informatics
Marine Biological Laboratory
7 MBL Street
Woods Hole, MA 02543 USA
+1 508 289 7632
--
email: sarkar@mbl.edu
www  : http://www.ubio.org/people/sarkar
skype/aim: ligerWeb
--
AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics
http://www.amia.org/meetings/stb08/
Submissions due by September 17, 2007
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