[ie-announce] MAR 24: Informatics Europe Distinguished Speakers Webinar "Bioinformatics and Its Relation to Data and Computer Science"

[Informatics Europe Office]

Dear colleagues,

We cordially invite you and your colleagues to participate in our next 
Informatics Europe webinar on 24 March (Thursday):

Scientific Webinar Series

Title: Bioinformatics and its relation to data and computer science*

Date: 24 March 2022, 5:30pm (CET)

Speaker: Prof. Jaap Heringa, Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, the 
Netherlands

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Register for this free webinar here: 
<https://www.informatics-europe.org/survey/index.php/783866/lang-en>

Abstract:
Bioinformatics is at the crossroads of computer science, mathematics, 
biology and physical chemistry, and has become indispensable in modern 
biology and medicine. It is predominantly a data science, studying 
systems with billions of components, for example constituting an 
organism with a complex and dynamic relationship with its environment. 
Gaining actionable insight in molecular systems often requires detailed 
knowledge about the functioning and interactions of components, which 
should be implemented in large-scale analytics and modelling pipelines. 
Computational methods have abounded in bioinformatics, for example based 
on evolutionary considerations such as common ancestry, which allow 
comparative analyses of DNA or protein sequences across organisms, or 
based on network representations to model molecular interactions. More 
recently and given the multimodal and distributed nature of 
bioinformatics data resources, semantic web technologies and FAIR data 
principles have become increasingly important, the acuteness of which 
was underscored dramatically by the recent and ongoing Covid-19 
pandemic. In this webinar, Prof. Heringa will give an introduction to 
bioinformatics, including its origin, historical developments and the 
type of research problems tackled in the field.

About the speaker:
Jaap Heringa is full professor of Bioinformatics at Vrije Universiteit 
(VU) Amsterdam, The Netherlands since 2002, and head of the Department 
of Computer Science at VU since 2018. He has been scientific co-director 
of the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC) from 2009-2013. Heringa 
has served as deputy Head of Node of ELIXIR-NL (i.e. the Dutch node of 
the ESFRI Landmark ELIXIR)) from 2013-2016, and is Head of Node since 
April 2016. Since 2014 he is director of the Netherlands Bioinformatics 
and Systems Biology Research School (BioSB) and as of January 2016 he is 
scientific lead of the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL). Heringa 
has been executive editor of Computational Chemistry and Biology 
(Elsevier) from 2014-2018 and was founding editor of Molecular Data 
Science (Elsevier) in 2018-2020. His areas of research are 
Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, while current research interests 
revolve around formal modelling strategies, sequence analysis, protein 
structure and interaction prediction, cancer-related data integration, 
molecular data science, data stewardship (FAIR data principles) and 
data-tools interoperability.

We look forward to meeting you at this upcoming webinar!

Yours sincerely,

Informatics Europe

/*This webinar is part of the Informatics Europe webinar series offered 
by IE since September 2021. These live webinars are hosted by 
distinguished keynote speakers. They are free webinars, open to all who 
have registered for participation through our webpage: 
<https://www.informatics-europe.org/services/webinars.html>
Webinar recordings will also be available later on our YouTube channel: 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQibGOphGko&list=PLToMZE8HOjcPH413y1TxeJEFHCwANyVuZ>