Professor David Gilbert

5.30pm

Professor David Gilbert will review the growth of Bioinformatics, highlight current developments in the field, and show how Bioinformatics is playing a key role in enabling Life Science to take a quantum leap forward in the way in which biological processes can be understood. He will also discuss challenges facing the relatonship between Bioinformatics and Life Science, and suggest ways in which these may be solved.

Dr Ela Hunt

6.00pm

Dr Ela Hunt will focus on the hopes and needs in the area of databases, visualisation, and hardware development and use. In the database domain current hopes are that the combined use of eXtensible Markup Language, XML, and ontologies (hierarchical vocabularies of terms) will allow for automated data integration. Hardware and software technologies (clusters, grids, FPGAs) are expected to improve the speed of data processing, while visualisation technniques will allow the researchers to understand more data in a more intuitive fashion.

David Gilbert is Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, and Director of the University's Bioinformatics Research Centre. He holds a PhD in Computing Science from Imperial College, and has been involved in research in Bioinformatics since 1994. David was an EPSRC Research Fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute in 1998, and a Leverhulme Research Fellow in 2000 at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UCL. He is the originator of the TOPS protein topology computational system for fast searching and matching of protein structures. His current research activities include systems biology, protein structures, machine learning, and the use of Grid technologies to support eScience for bioinformatics. David is a member of the International Society for Computational Biology, and co-chair of the large international Bioinformatics Conference ISMB/ECCB2004 (http://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2004/) which will be held in Glasgow during 31 July - 4 August 2004. More information on David Gilbert and the activities of the Bioinformatics Research Centre can be found at www.brc.dcs.gla.ac.uk

Dr Ela Hunt is a Medical Research Council research fellow in bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow. She is leading a research team developing database and visualisation technologies to handle the explosion of biological data produced by new laboratory techniques including DNA sequencing, microarrays and proteomics. Ela previously developed a database supporting the mapping and sequencing of human chromosome 21, at Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, http://chr21.molgen.mpg.de . She has also designed and implemented databases and knowledge management tools while working for BP in Glasgow and Aberdeen.