ATLANTA, April 7, 2006  CoC Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Professors Concettina Guerra and Alberto Apostolico led the Tenth Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) as conference chair and program chair, respectively. RECOMB is a well-established  conference in the dynamic field that bridges computer science and biology, reshaping medical science and introducing revolutionary improvements to health and medicine. The University of Padova hosted this year’s events at the Cinema Palace in Venice, Italy on April 2-5.

"Bioinformatics and computational biology are predicted to represent in this century a revolution surpassing the one brought about by computers in the last one," says Apsotolico, a pioneer of string processing. This year’s RECOMB topic revolved around two landmark events that are forever changing the way biology and medicine are pursued: the transition from cells to macromolecules as the main subject of biology; and the emergence of computing as a fundamental tool in conquering the daunting amounts of data produced since advanced sequencing techniques began unveiling genome sequences and related compounds of biological interest. 
 
RECOMB ‘06 boasted a scientific program in line with its tradition of excellence. Over 700 participants enjoyed a conference program which included 40 paper presentations selected by an international program committee of 38 experts–all past chairs and steering committee members who also developed an extraordinary roster of seven distinguished keynote speakers:

Anne-Claude Gavin - EMBL Heidelberg, Germany
David Haussler - University of California, Santa Cruz
Ajay K. Royyuru - IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center
David Sankoff - University of Ottawa, Canada
Michael S. Waterman - University of Southern California
Carl Zimmer - U.S. bestselling science writer
Roman A. Zubarev - Uppsala University, Sweden

In addition, two poster sessions on 200 displays showcased some of the best recent and on-going research in the field. The RECOMB conference series was founded in 1997 to provide a scientific forum for theoretical advances in computational biology and their applications in molecular biology and medicine. The conferences attracts research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology, such as genomics, molecular sequence analysis, recognition of genes and regulatory elements, molecular evolution, protein structure, drug design, and computational proteomics.

Concettina Guerra, CoC Interactive and Intelligent Computing professor was honored to chair the special tenth anniversary of what is considered the flagship conference in computational biology. "The overwhelming success of this year's RECOMB was made possible by the contribution of many people, groups, and institutions," says Guerra. The College of Computing at Georgia Tech was among the prestigious list of international sponsors which included the National Science Foundation (NSF),the Department of Energy, IBM, the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute, the Internaitonal Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and Associazione Italiana per il Calcolo Automatico (AICA).

For more information on the 2006 RECOMB click here.