Proceedings of the 2011 MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) Conference

The Eighth Annual Conference of the MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS’2011) was held in College Station, Texas on April 1-2, 2011. The Conference General Chair was Ulisses Braga-Neto, the MCBIOS President for the 2010-2011 term, from Texas A&M University. There were nearly 200 registrants and 140 abstracts were submitted, divided into 48 oral presentation abstracts and 92 poster session abstracts. In addition, participants attended talks by very distinguished Keynote speakers. Joan W. Bennett, from Rutgers University and Member of the National Academy of Science, presented the talk “Chromosomal Composition and Computational Competence;” Donald Geman, from The Johns Hopkins University and co-inventor of the Gibbs Sampler and Random Forest Classifiers, lectured on “Measuring Network Regulation and Differential Expression by Rank Conservation;” while John Weinstein, Chair of the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, talked on “Personalizing Cancer Medicine in the Era of Next-Generation Sequencing: Omics and Informatics.” The conference also benefited from invited dinner and lunch speakers, who gave informal, highly informative and entertaining talks. Edward R. Dougherty, from Texas A&M University and Director of Computational Biology at the Translational Genomics Institute, asked the audience “Is Biological Science Delightful?” whereas Ernesto Marques, from the Center for Vaccine Research at the University of Pittsburgh, gave the talk “Activation of the Complement System in Dengue Infection: Opportunities for Computational Modeling.” Participants also had the opportunity to attend hands-on workshops on NCBI tools, presented by Peter Cooper from NCBI/NIH, and on protein evolution, presented by Hugh Nicholas and Troy Wymore, from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The winners of conference awards were: Best Oral Presentations (students): First place: Suzanne Matthews, Texas A&M University Second place (3-way tie): Lori Dalton, Texas A&M University Second place: Shelton Griffith, Oak Ridge National Lab Second place: Winston Haynes, Hendrix College Best Oral Presentations (Post-Doctoral fellows): Yan Li, NCTR Fan Zhang, IUPUI Best Poster (Computation): First place: Tianchuan Du, Southern University Second place: Christopher Cathey, Jackson State University Third place: Ralph Crosby, Texas A&M University Best Poster (Biology): First place: Awantika Singh, UALR/UAMS Second place: Mohammed Shahrokh Esfahani, Texas A&M University Third place: Fang-Han Hsu, Texas A&M University MCBIOS Outstanding Service Award: Dr. Jonathan D. Wren, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation