ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics 2013
Keynote Speakers
Updated March 07, 2013
Dr. Erik Bongcam-Rudloff Pr. Jean-Michel Claverie
Pr. Muntaser Ibrahim Pr. Jessica Kissinger
Pr. Doumbia Seydou Dr. Alfonso Valencia
Biographies:
Pr Doumbia Seydou, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor Seydou is deputy scientific director of the Malaria Research and Training Center, and professor of epidemiology at the Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, and University of Bamako, Mali.
Talk Title:
Bioinformatics for Public Health in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities
Biography:
Professor Doumbia Seydou is a professor of Epidemiology, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Bamako, Bamako, Mali, and Responsible for MsPH training program in Epidemiology, he is also the Deputy Director of NIH/NIAID-University of Bamako Intramural Research Programs, Malaria Research and Training, Center, Faculty of Medicine, University of Bamako, Bamako, Mali. For more than 15 years he has been involved in several aspects of malaria and other infectious diseases research including leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, and HIV/AIDS.
Pr Jessica Kissinger
The Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, USA
Jessica Kissinger is interested in parasite genomics and the biology of genome evolution.
Talk Title:
Biography:
Doctor Kissinger's research focuses on, but is not limited to, Apicomplexan parasites. Her approach is to apply molecular, computational and phylogenetic tools to the analysis of parasite genomes. Projects include the development of tools for data mining, comparative genomics and assessing the phylogenetic distribution of genes.
Pr. Jean-Michel Claverie
Professor of Medical Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Mediterranée School of Medicine, Director of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology, and head of the Structural and Genomic Information Laboratory, a CNRS unit (UPR2589) in Marseille.
Talk Title:
Open Questions About Giant Viruses
Biography:
His main current research interest is the evolutionary origin and the biology of the paradoxical giant DNA viruses such as Mimivirus and the biodiversity of the marine microbial world (protists, bacteria and viruses). The laboratory’s approaches include structural, molecular, and cellular biology, high throughput genome and transcriptome sequencing, large-scale comparative genomics, and the development of relevant bioinformatic methods for sequence analysis and datamining.
He also has a strong interest in the application of high throughput new generation sequencing genomic approaches in the biomedical and biotechnological fields.
He is the co-author of more than 160 scientific publications in international journals and of the best-seller book "Bioinformatics for Dummies".
Pr. Muntaser Ibrahim
Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Institute for Endemic Diseases, University of Khartoum.
Talk Title:
Genome Analysis Under Thrust of Diversity
Biography:
Muntaser has had a major interest in the immuno-epidemiology of malaria in the low-transmission setting, and is expanding this to include epidemiological studies in a region where malaria is more endemic.
A specific focus of his research is to define ethnic differences in susceptibility to malaria, at both the immunological and genetic levels, and to establish the epidemiological infrastructure to dissect the molecular basis of these differences by genomic association analysis.
Dr. Alfonso Valencia
Biologist with formal training in population genetics and biophysics which he received from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He was awarded his PhD in 1988 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Talk Title:
Biography:
He was a Visiting Scientist at the American Red Cross Laboratory in 1987 and from 1989-1994 was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the laboratory of C. Sander at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany.
In 1994 Alfonso Valencia set up the Protein Design Group at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid where he was appointed as Research Professor in 2005.
He is a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), Founder and former Vice President of the International Society for Computational Biology where he has been Chair of the Systems Biology and/or Text Mining Tracks of the main Computational Biology Annual Conference (ISMB) since 2003. He was honoured as ISCB-Fellow in 2010.
Alfonso Valencia serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory; the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, Biozentrum, Basel; the INTERPRO database; the Spanish Grant Evaluation Agency (ANEP); as well as the Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation Programme on Functional Genomics (2006-2011).
Alfonso Valencia is Co-Executive Editor of Bionformatics, serves on the Editorial Board of EMBO Journal and EMBO Reports, among others. He is the Director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB).
Dr. Erik Bongcam-Rudloff
Associate Professor, Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Talk Title:
Next Generation Biotechnologies and Society: New Insights
Biography:
Erik Bongcam-Rudloff received his doctorate in medical sciences from Uppsala University, Sweden. He is now the Director of the SLU Global Bioinformatics Centre (SGBC) at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Erik was the chairman of EMBnet (2003-2010) (www.embnet.org), a science-based group of worldwide collaborating bioinformatics nodes.
Bongcam-Rudloff is today Chair of SeqAhead (www.seqahead.eu), a Biomedical European COST Action: "Next Generation Sequencing Data Analysis Network" and Coordinator of ALLBIO, a FP7 project: "Broadening the Bioinformatics Infrastructure to unicellular, animal, and plant science" (www.allbioinformatics.eu). He is also the founder of eBioinformatics.org the creators of eBiotools, eBioX and eBioKit (www.ebioinformatics.org).
His main research deals with development of bioinformatics solutions and teaching for the Life Sciences community.