January 21 -23rd Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC2013) Vancouver
Conference Organizers are Dr. Steven Jones (APBC2013 General Chair) and S. Cenk Sahinalp (APBC2013 PC Chair). The conference website is located at: http://www.apbc2013.org/
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Jun Wang
Dr. Jun Wang is the Executive Director of the BGI (previously known as the Beijing Genomics Institute). He was instrumental in the 1999 founding and the growth of the BGI Bioinformatics Department, which is now widely recognized as one of world’s premier research facilities committed to excellence in genome sciences. Dr. Wang also holds a position as an Ole Rømer professor at the University of Copenhagen. He has authored 100+ peer-reviewed original papers – of which 59 are published in Cell, Nature (including Nature series), N Engl J Med., and Science (17 as cover story). Among those 59, WJ is the first/co-first author or corresponding/co-corresponding author for 37 (10 as cover) of them. He has been recognized with an award from His Royal Highness Prince Foundation in Denmark, an Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Top 10 Scientific Achievements in China, and the prize for Important Innovation and Contribution from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on genomics and related bioinformatics analysis of complex diseases and agricultural crops, with the goal of developing applications using the genomic information.
Dr. Colin Collins
Dr. Collins is a professor of Urologic Sciences in the school of medicine at the University of British Columbia and a senior scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre where he directs the Laboratory for Advanced Genome Analysis (LAGA), which is the Centre’s genomics and bioinformatics core facility. Expertise at LAGA spans from algorithm development, bioinformatics pipeline implementation, and biostatistics, to a wide range of microarray and sequencing applications. In addition, Dr. Collins is an associate adjunct professor at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He has held positions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Collins’ current research is best described as translational genomics where mathematics, computer science, genomics and clinical science converge in systems biology, diagnostics, and ultimately therapeutics. His work as a member of the UCSF Prostate Specialized Program In Research Excellence resulted in identification and patenting of a suite of genome based biomarkers that show promise for predicting a patient’s risk of progression to metastasis. Dr. Collins invented and patented End Sequence Profiling (ESP) the forerunner of paired-end sequencing. Dr. Collins is now combining novel computational methods with massively parallel sequencing to explore the mechanisms of prostate cancer progression including development of resistance to therapy. To date this work has resulted in identification of a new type of prostate cancer, sequence-based pathology, an important mechanism of prostate cancer progression, and a pilot study of personalized oncology that combined a patient-derived xenograft with a novel therapeutic strategy.
Dr. Jay Shendure
Jay Shendure, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1996, and completed a Fulbright scholarship to India in 1997. He then entered the Medical Scientist Training Program at Harvard Medical School, receiving his PhD in 2005 and his MD in 2007. His PhD with George Church notably included one of the first successful demonstrations of massively parallel or next generation DNA sequencing. Dr. Shendure joined the faculty at the Department of Genome Sciences in 2007. His research group in Seattle is broadly interested in technology development in genomics, and has made significant contributions to the development of methods for selective capture of targeted subsets of the human genome such as the exome, the integration of these methods with next-generation DNA sequencing, and their application to directly identify the basis of Mendelian disorders (e.g. Miller syndrome, Kabuki syndrome). Other technologies recently developed by the lab include haplotype-resolved genome sequencing and synthetic saturation mutagenesis.