The first Advances in Computational Biology conference – Fostering collaboration among women scientists will bring together researchers working on systems biology, omics technologies, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing with applications to biology from both the public and private sectors.

One of the main purposes of the conference is to visualize and promote the research done by women scientists and for this reason, all presenters will be women, although the conference is open to everyone. We want to create a space to foster collaborations between scientists, providing an excellent opportunity to share ideas and build research networks.

Topics included:
- Learning from Biological Sequences: population genomics, evolutionary genomics, systems biology, transcriptomics, sequence analysis
- When Computational Biology meets Medicine: biomedical applications, mutational landscapes, clinical genomics
- Machines Speeding up Research: high performance computing, machine learning in the life sciences, imaging data analysis, dynamic simulations and algorithm development

Key dates:
- Open registration: May 6th, 2019
- Abstract submission opens: May 6th, 2019
- Abstract submission deadline: July 1st, 2019
- Early bird registration deadline: September 15th, 2019
- Registration deadline: November 1st, 2019
- AdvCompBio Conference: November 28th - 29th, 2019

The programme will include poster and oral presentations, as well as keynotes from leading scientists in the computational biology and high-performance computing fields. The keynote speakers of the conference are: Christine Orengo, group leader of Orengo Group at University College London, Natasa Przulj, group leader of the Life Sciences – Integrative Computational Network Biology at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Marie-Christine Sawley, director of the Exascale Lab at Intel.

The confirmed chairs of the conference are: Alison Kennedy, director of the STFC Hartree Centre, Janet Kelso, group leader of the Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Nuria Lopez-Bigas, leader of the Biomedical Genomics Research Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine Barcelona.

Furthermore, the participants will have the opportunity to interact personally with female leaders in the fields of IT, academic research and politics that support the conference.

The conference is organised by the Bioinfo4Women programme from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) with the collaboration of IMIM-UPF Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB/ELIXIR-ES) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). It is an affiliate conference of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).