NIH director to keynote local conference 10/17/02

James Cassatt, a division director at the National Institutes of Health, will be the keynote speaker at the first CERT Biomedical Informatics Conference Nov. 5.

The conference, hosted by the Consortium for Education, Research and Technology of North Louisiana’s Institute for Biomedical Informatics, is designed to bring together scientists, researchers, practitioners, industry leaders, educators and students from all of North Louisiana’s colleges and universities interested in applying informatics to biology and medicine.

Cassatt is director of the Division of Cell Biology and Biophysics at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and acting director of the NIGMS Center of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. The center has overall responsibility for coordinating extramural biocomputing activities for the NIH through the Biomedical Science and Technology Initiative consortium.

Marjan Trutschl, an LSUS assistant professor in computer science and a Bioinformatics expert who joined the LSUS faculty in August, invited the nationally renown Cassatt to Shreveport so conference participants would have first-hand knowledge of funding priorities for grants.

“We are excited that Dr. Cassatt accepted our invitation,” Trutschl said. “He is the top person in Bioinformatics at the National Institutes of Health.”

The scope of the conference ranges from computational tools for analysis of biological systems to knowledge discovery for biomedicine, nanotechnology and microsystems, health information management, and health care quality improvement. The conference will feature oral platform sessions that include presentations by recognized experts and workers in the field.

The conference is free and includes lunch. It will be held at the Louisiana Tech Technology Transfer Center. For more information and online registration, go to the Web site: www.ccm.lsuhsc-s.edu/cibi/ .