Waterman Symposium

RECOMB 2016 Symposium: The Expanding Field of Computational Biology

In honor of Michael Waterman’s 75th birthday and his contributions to RECOMB

April 17, 2016, 1:30pm – 6:00pm

RECOMB 2016 invites all who are interested to attend our special symposium held on Sunday, April 17th. This symposium is being hosted to honor Mike Waterman on his 75th birthday. Dr. Waterman, along with Pavel Pevzner and Sorin Istrail, co-founded the RECOMB conference 20 years ago. He is also the founding editor of the Journal of Computational Biology, the official Journal of RECOMB. He has made numerous contributions in computational biology, including the Smith-Waterman dynamic programming algorithm for sequence alignment, the algorithmic approach to RNA structure prediction, algorithms for genome assembly including the Eulerian graph method and the Lander-Waterman model for physical mapping.

Registration for the Symposium is free; however, you are required to register if you plan to attend. Please register at the following link: https://commerce.cashnet.com/RECOMB

Born in 1942, Michael S. Waterman holds an Endowed Associates Chair at USC. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, US National Academy of Sciences and US National Academy of Engineering. He is a foreign member to the French Académie des Sciences and Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received honorary degrees from Tel Aviv University and the University of Southern Denmark. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow, received a Gairdner Foundation International Award and the Dan David Prize in Bioinformatics.

Keynote Speakers:

Ken Lange, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Paul Thompson, University of Southern California, USA

Other Invited Speakers:

Gaudenz Danuser, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA

Eran Halperin, Tel Aviv University, Israel, and University of California- Berkeley, USA

Ben Raphael, Brown University, USA

Andrew D. Smith, University of Southern California, USA

Martin Vingron, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Germany

Wei Wang, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Organized by Fengzhu Sun, University of Southern California


Waterman Symposium Schedule:

Session Chair: Fengzhu Sun, University of Southern California, USA.

1:30-1:40: Introduction

1:40-2:25: Ken Lange, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Next Generation Statistical Genetics

2:25-2:50: Eran Halperin, Tel Aviv University, Israel, and University of California-Berkeley,
USA
Confounders in epigenome-wide association studies

2:50-3:15: Ben Raphael, Brown University, USA
Algorithms for Cancer Genomics

3:15-3:40: Gaudenz Danuser, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, USA
Inferring causality in molecular pathways from live cell image fluctuations

3:40-4:00: Break

Session Chair: Martin Vingron, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Germany

4:00-4:45: Paul Thompson, University of Southern California, USA
The ENIGMA Project: Investigating Brain Diseases with Imaging and Genomics in 50,000 People

4:45-5:10: Andrew D. Smith, University of Southern California, USA
A deeper look at sequencing depth

5:10-5:35: Wei Wang, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Alignment-free RNAseq Analysis 

5:35-6:00: Martin Vingron, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Germany
Non-methylated islands = CpG-islands?