Challenges and Opportunities in Systems Biology

Systems biology is an emerging field deals with the quantitative study of biological processes at a system-wide level by abstracting whole biological systems or subsystems, instead of treating their constituent parts and processes in isolation. Progress in this area will involve computer scientists in close collaboration with life scientists and mathematicians. In contrast with the molecular biology revolution, computer science will be essential to the new biology, rather than playing a background role. The new partnership promises immense rewards, with the potential to profoundly improve health care and medical research, from more effective pharmaceutical design to the development of individualised medicine that will draw on genetic profiles. Systems biology has recently been opened up by advances in understanding biological processes at the molecular level allowing us to make observations at the meso and nanoscales and by computer technology, which is generating vast amounts of
genomic and proteomic data. This new stage in the biological revolution involves the fields of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. These fields take us from the DNA sequence of a gene, to the structure of the product for which it codes (usually a protein), to the activity of that protein and its function within a cell, the tissue, and ultimately the organism. This talk will overview the field of Systems biology and highlight the existing challenges and potential opportunities.

Short CV

Albert Zomaya is currently the Head of School and CISCO Systems Chair Professor of Internetworking in the School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney. Prior to joining Sydney University he was a Full Professor in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at the University of Western Australia, where he also led the Parallel Computing Research Laboratory during the period 1990-2002. He served as Associate, Deputy, and Acting-Head in the same department, and held visiting positions at Waterloo University and the University of Missouri-Rolla. He is the author/co-author of six books, more than 200 publications in technical journals and conferences, and the editor of seven books and seven conference volumes. He is currently an associate editor for 15 journals, the Founding Editor of the Wiley Book Series on Parallel and Distributed Computing and a Founding Co-Editor of the Wiley Book Series on Bioinformatics. Professor Zomaya was the Chair the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (1999-2003) and currently serves on its executive committee. He has been actively involved in the organization of national and international conferences. He received the 1997 Edgeworth David Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales for outstanding contributions to Australian Science. In September 2000 he was awarded the IEEE Computer Society's Meritorious Service Award. Professor Zomaya is a chartered engineer (CEng), a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (U.K.), and member of the ACM. His research interests are in the areas of high performance computing, parallel algorithms, mobile computing, and bioinformatics.