Youth Bioinformatics Symposium

International Society For Computational Biology, Leesburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

The inaugural Youth Bioinformatics Symposium willbe held in the greater Washington, D.C. in June 2016. This novel workshop run by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), is focused on introducing secondary school (8-11th grade) students to computational biology and bioinformatics. Questionnaire will be distributed to gauge the level of interest in bioinformatics and database searches before and after the symposium, and the experiences of the organizers will be summarized in an SOP that will be provided to the future organizers and volunteers. The symposium will be opened by keynote speaker, former president of ISCB. There will be three workshops: on biomedical data mining, on protein 3-D modeling, and a mini-science fair activity. Sequence database searches using the BLAST suite of programs are now part of AP Biology curriculum, and students will get a hands-on introduction into the field.