On June 4 Turing Award winner Richard Karp (USA) spoke at the CWI on his recent research and his vision on the computational biology. He lectured during the annual CWI Lectures in Mathematics and Computer Science, with this year’s theme "Starting Life Sciences at CWI”. With this day the start of a new Life Sciences research at the CWI in January 2009 was celebrated.
Besides Karp, Luigi Preziosi (Italy) and CWI researchers Gunnar Klau and Roeland Merks also gave lectures. Preziosi, a specialist in the field of tumor modeling, gave a lecture about new interactions between mathematics, computer science and cancer research. Klau and Merks presented examples of life sciences research at CWI with questions like: "In what way is city heating connected to cancer research? How do cells know how to make a blood vessel – can they communicate and organize themselves?"
Richard Karp is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. He won a variety of prizes, including the ACM Turing Award, the USA National Medal of Science, the Benjamin Franklin Medal and the Kyoto Prize. Karp has made important discoveries in computational complexity, operations research, and, more recently, in computational biology. Luigi Preziosi is Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Polictecnico di Torino in Italy. His research focuses on mathematical modeling of tumor growth, cell and tissue mechanics and the formation of blood vessels. More information about the other speakers and abstracts of their lectures are available on www.cwi.nl/CWILectures2009 .
Life Sciences in the CWI
The Life Sciences group at CWI is an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, computer scientists and theoretical biologists, totaling about thirty researchers. This group is developing algorithms, methods, models and simulations for a wide range of biological topics, with a strong emphasis on systems biology. CWI is working with a large network of researchers in biology and biomedical sciences.
The meeting is co-organized by the Netherlands Institute for Systems Biology (NISB)
