Top scientists to attend Doha symposium

The two scientific research institutes within Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development will host the event on June 25 at the Qatar National Convention Centre, from 8.30am. One of the keynote speakers will be renowned geneticist, molecular biologist and mathematician Dr Eric Lander, a professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The other keynote speaker is acclaimed molecular biologist professor Jeremy K Nicholson, chair in Biological Chemistry and Head of Department of Surgery & Cancer at Imperial College London. “This is the first time in Qatar that international bioinformaticians and scientists who use bioinformatics platforms in the country are coming together to discuss the latest developments in the field,” said Dr Abdelali Haoudi, QF’s vice-president of research and acting executive director of QBRI. The goal of the symposium is to create a bioinformatics consortium in Qatar that would be used as a platform for interested scientists to establish future collaborative research projects, he explained. QCRI executive director Dr Ahmed Elmagarmid pointed out that computing is playing an increasingly important role in biomedical research. “This symposium will help establish how Qatar can best marshal its technical resources and human capacity to advance biomedical research in Qatar.” The symposium has attracted top international and local experts in the fields of translational systems biology and bioinformatics. Dr Lander is co-chair of US President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. He was a principal leader of the international Human Genome Project, which completed mapping the human blueprint in 2003. Dr Lander’s biomedical research also has ranged over mammalian genomics; human population genetics; medical genetics – including cancer, diabetes, inflammatory diseases and many other genetic conditions; evolution; and computational biology. Even as a young biochemist in the 1980s, professor Nicholson brimmed with new ideas. In a decade when molecular biology and the human genome project had riveted the attention of the scientific community, he was one of the first to embrace the importance of metabolic profiling. Professor Nicholson’s current role is to translate advanced spectroscopic techniques for molecular phenotyping into point-of-care clinical practice throughout the entire hospital system. His research involves understanding the role of microbes in regulating human metabolic pathways and how the microbes are involved in drug metabolism toxicity as well as variations in therapeutic responses.   Dr David Gifford (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), Dr Prasanna Kolatkar (Genome Institute of Singapore) and Dr Amos Bairoch (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) are the other speakers. Local scientists from QBRI, QCRI, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Qatar University, Hamad Medical Corporation, and Anti Doping Lab Qatar will also give presentations.from gulf times.