Womans & Minorities Dominate
6th International Biocomplexity Summer School!

The 6th International Biocomplexity Summer School sponsored by the NSF, the Barrett Honors College and Harrington Department of Bioengineering at ASU and technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society was held at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, July 1-7, 2007. This summer school was a continuation of previous summer schools. Twenty five students and 5 faculty attended the 6th summer school. The NSF and Barretts College at ASU co-sponsored 16 of the 25 students.

The summer school was an excellent learning, teaching and brain-storming opportunity for students, post-docs and young researchers as well as the summer school faculty. It was an opportunity for students to personally meet with leaders in the field while enjoying a pleasant location.

Carolyn Sparrey of UC Berkeley led the student panel to discuss the research concepts presented during the week, the educational and career concerns for students in these fields and provides suggestions for future smmer schools. Amber Ribblett of HDBE of ASU delivered the student banquet address.
 
The summer school lectures focused on the novel approaches of mathematical and computational challenges in Systems Biology and the new directions in computational biology, bioinformatics and molecular engineering research and to facilitate rapid diffusion of these mathematical and computational tools in the biological sciences.

These methods will be helpful for undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and mathematics who are interested in pursuing research in biology, biomolecular engineering and bioengineering since the summer school provided exceptional insights into the fundamental challenges facing biological science. Five distinguished faculty gave these lectures, including Profs. P. Sloot, D. Fenstermacher, S. McWeeney, Y. Akay and M. Akay.

We believe that this summer school will further stimulate interdisciplinary research and collaboration among engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and medical researchers and will help understand complex biological systems and signals and in identifying new directions for biomedical research and its applications.

I thank Dean M. Jacobs of the Barrett Honors College and Dean D. Meldrum of the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering for their support and encouragement. I also thank David Akkurt, a PhD student and webmaster of the HDBE for maintaining the summer school web page.

Metin Akay
Chair and Organizer
Summer School on Biocomplexity From System to Gene ©
Harrington Dept of Bioengineering
Ira A Fulton School of Engineering
Arizona State University