Keystone Symposia to Convene Two-Day Conference on "Big Data in Biology" March 24-25, 2014 in San Francisco

SILVERTHORNE, Colo., March 11, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Keystone Symposia is convening its first conference on "Big Data in Biology," at the Fairmont San Francisco hotel March 24-25. The meeting is also the nonprofit organization's first "short" two-day conference format designed to be more attractive to busy professionals. Although there will be registration and a welcome mixer on Sunday evening, March 23, actual sessions will convene at 8:30 AM after breakfast on Monday, March 24, running through the early evening, and again from 8:30 AM on Tuesday, March 25 through 3:15 PM.

The conference's scientific organizers are Drs. Lincoln Stein of Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Doreen Ware of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Michael Schatz of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. According to lead organizer Dr. Stein, "The last decade has seen an unprecedented explosion in the amount of information generated by the biological research community, and a concomitant rise in the challenges of sharing, archiving, integrating and analyzing it. The conference addresses the question 'How do we handle big data?' across multiple research specialties that rarely interact."

Approximately 20 speakers from academia, industry and the nonprofit sector in the USA, Canada and Europe will present on topics ranging from genome sequencing to cloud computing to imaging and pharmacogenomics needs. They include keynote speaker Dr. David Haussler of UC Santa Cruz speaking on "Large-Scale Cancer Genomics," Dr. Dan Stanzione of The University of Texas at Austin talking about the iPlant Collaborative, Dr. Jill Mesirov of the Broad Institute presenting on GenomeSpace, Dr. Ajay Royyuru of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center on IBM's and National Geographic's Genographic Project, and Dr. Stuart Young of Annai Systems Inc. on the BioCompute Farm. A panel discussion on Monday afternoon will feature interactive discussion among experts focusing on the challenge of "Control Access to Individual Genomes."

In keeping with the spirit of longer Keystone Symposia conferences, there will be several short talks chosen from abstract submissions. And a poster session Monday evening from 5 to 7 PM will feature a diverse array of work in the field, especially from junior and up-and-coming investigators.

About Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology
Keystone Symposia is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that convenes open scientific research conferences. It was founded as UCLA Symposia in 1972 and has been headquartered in Colorado since 1990. Its 1984 conference on AIDS was the first open, international conference held on the topic and was widely credited with helping to forge a scientific consensus that AIDS is caused by a retrovirus.

The organization will convene 58 conferences in its 2013-2014 season, the majority of which take place between January and April 2014, on topics ranging from cancer and immunology to neuroscience and stem cells. More information about the Big Data conference be found at www.keystonesymposia.org/14F2 and on the organization and its meetings at www.keystonesymposia.org and www.keystonesymposia.org/meetings, respectively.

Yvonne M. Psaila
Director of Marketing & Communications
Keystone Symposia on Molecular & Cellular Biology
Phone: 1 970-262-2676
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology