Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Creating Teams for Bioinformatics: The Educational Challenge for Biology and Computer Science at the Undergraduate and Graduate Level Four Case Studies from the Great Lakes Area
Department
School of Computing & Information Systems
College
Padnos College of Engineering and Computing
Date Range
2011-2012
Abstract
The panel will explore the state of art of bioinformatics education in the Great Lakes Region by investigating different approaches at the undergraduate and graduate level under the aspect of future team building in research or industry. Topic relevance to the GLBIO community: While bioinformatics education only occasionally was a topic on the GLBIO or OCCBIO conferences, over the last couple of years, the RECOMB Satellite Conference on Bioinformatics Education has intensified the discussion about the importance of bioinformatics education for undergraduate biology students. A main focus of that conference was to provide examples on how to teach bioinformatics, but one of the findings of the discussions was to reiterate that bioinformatics research and applications will be carried out by interdisciplinary teams. These teams consist in general of bioinformatics scientists from different backgrounds including biology and computer science among others, and not from biologists with bioinformatics training alone. Crucial for those teams to work together is a understanding of the other team member s field, i.e., biologists need a basis training in computer science and computer scientists need a basic understanding of biology in order to communicate, cooperate, and build useful tools for biologists. This is true not only for the undergraduate but also for the graduate level. One way to deal with that challenge is to team students up while they are still in college or grad school to prepare them for their future jobs. Another question that arises is how much training do we need in the other discipline.
Conference Name
Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference GLBIO 2012
Conference Location
Ann Arbor, MI
ScholarWorks Citation
Tusch, Guenter; Blumenthal, Robert; Draghici, Sorin; Leontis, Neocles; and Schwartz, Russell, "Creating Teams for Bioinformatics: The Educational Challenge for Biology and Computer Science at the Undergraduate and Graduate Level Four Case Studies from the Great Lakes Area" (2011). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 262.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/262
