BIT Events

IGB strives to provide a wealth of educational experiences for its membership and the academic community at large. IGB sponsors a number of speakers and conferences each year, including a Distinguished Speaker Series, Colloquia, and an annual IGB Symposium featuring one of its seven major program areas.  BIT trainees are encouraged to attend as many of these activities as possible to enrich their training experience.

On a more frequent basis, trainees are requiered to participate in the following BIT Program activities:

IGB and Home Department Seminars. All BIT students are required to attend seminars sponsored both by their home department and by the IGB. The IGB seminars most often emphasize computational aspects of biomedical informatics and computational biology. The home department seminars emphasize topics in the student’s primary area(s) of expertise. 

BIT Lunch.  Trainees meet as a group the first Monday of each month for lunch. At these lunches the trainees are free to openly discuss their research projects and develop closer professional and personal ties with one another. The BIT lunch is facilitated by a BIT group Web site hosted by the trainees. At a typical BIT lunch, a biology trainee(s) might informally present their ongoing research, highlighting areas where they need bioinformatics assistance or input from computer scientists and/or computational biologists. At that point, the computation students might offer advice and explain the basis of computational methods and/or algorithms to address the problem. Often, appropriate algorithms or computational methods must be devised to deal with the problem. Sometimes the solutions are trivial, but at other times they develop into collaborations among the members of the group. Occasionally, the student’s invite BIT faculty or visiting scientists from other academic institutions or industry to discuss their interests with the group as well as host career development sessions.
           
Student Research Presentations.  Each month, two program students are required to present a formal seminar to the training grant faculty and their research groups. This provides the students with the skills necessary for communicating their work to an interdisciplinary scientific audience. Every student in the program is required to present at least one seminar each year and to present a talk at the Annual BIT Program Symposium (see below)..

2009 Biomedical Informatics Training (BIT) Program Symposium
Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 9:00am to 4:00pm
Donald Bren Hall (Building #314), Room 6011, UC Irvine
Program Schedule and Abstracts

2008 Biomedical Informatics Training (BIT) Program Symposium
Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 9:00am to 4:45pm
Donald Bren Hall (Building #314), Room 6011, UC Irvine
Program Schedule and Abstracts

2007 Biomedical Informatics Training (BIT) Program Symposium
Monday, May 14, 2007, 9:00am to 4:10pm
CALIT2 (Building #325), Main Auditorium, Room 1100, UC Irvine
Program Schedule and Abstracts

This symposium brings opportunity for the BIT predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees to present their theses and postdoctoral research projects. The NIH-NLM funded Biomedical Informatics Training (BIT) Program provides in-depth training to students in either computational or life sciences, and trains them to working competence in the cross-discipline with emphases in bioinformatics approaches to problems in molecular structure/function prediction and determination, comparative and functional genomics, chemical informatics, and computational and systems biology.