2009 q-bio Summer School and Conference on Cellular Information Processing

The 2009 q-bio Summer School on Cellular Information Processing was held from July 20 to August 4, 2009 in Los Alamos, NM. The purpose of the School, an annual event that began in 2007, is to advance predictive modeling of cellular regulatory systems. The School introduces researchers (mainly graduate students and postdocs) to the field of quantitative biology, which emphasizes modeling and quantitative experimentation for understanding and predicting the behaviors of particular regulatory systems, phenomena that manifest themselves in many biological systems, and general principles of cellular information processing. The curriculum, as usual, focused on modeling of signal transduction systems, modeling of genetic regulatory networks, modeling of stochastic processes in biochemical systems, and other topics in quantitative biology. Participants in the School included 28 students from 20 different institutions, such as Caltech, Columbia and Stanford. The School included talks from the students; homework problems, which in the past have led to scientific publications (Dreisigmeyer DW et al., IET Syst. Biol. 2:293-303, 2008 and de Ronde WH, Daniels BC, Mugler A et al., IET Syst. Biol. 3:429-437, 2009); and lectures from 19 senior researchers, including lectures from four Fellows at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Hans Frauenfelder, James P. Freyer, Byron Goldstein, and Alan S. Perelson), the Ulam Visiting Scholar Michael A. Savageau in the Center for Nonlinear Studies, seven other researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (William S. Hlavacek, Yi Jiang, Brian Munsky, Ilya Nemenman, Nikolai A. Sinitsyn, Michael E. Wall and Anton Zilman), one researcher from the University of New Mexico Cancer Center (Bridget S. Wilson), and six researchers from institutions outside of New Mexico (James R. Faeder, James A. Glazier, Richard G. Posner, Vito Quaranta, William S. Ryu, and Alissa M. Weaver).

The q-bio Summmer School was followed by the affiliated 2009 q-bio Conference, which took place on the campus of St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. The conference was attended by over 200 researchers from around the world. The program included 27 invited talks, including six talks from members of the National Academies (Bruce M. Alberts, Carlos Bustamante, Rita R. Colwell, Nina V. Fedoroff, Michael Levine, and Linda R. Petzold), 22 contributed talks, three tutorial talks, 16 poster spotlight talks, and 110 poster presentations.

The q-bio Summer School was sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was organized by William S. Hlavacek, Yi Jiang, Ilya Nemenman and Michael E. Wall. Funding from the Institute for Advanced Studies helped 11 junior researchers and five senior researchers from member institutions of the New Mexico Consortium attend the q-bio Conference, which was also supported by the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the Computational and Life Sciences Strategic Initiative at Emory University, the Center for Spatiotemporal Modeling of Cell Signaling in the University of New Mexico Cancer Center, and Plectix BioSystems, Inc. For additional information, see the q-bio web site (http://cnls.lanl.gov/q-bio/).