S* Alliance Announces Fifth Online Bioinformatics Course
April 7th 2004.
The S* Life Science Informatics Alliance announced today that the S* 5th Online
Bioinformatics Course will be held from 3rd May 2004 to 16th August 2004. To
date, S* has enrolled more than 700 participants from throughout the world.
In collaboration with the APBioNet, many participants come from the Asia-Pacific
region including Singapore, Malaysia, India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines,
South Korea, Japan and other countries, benefitting particularly
young aspiring bioinformaticians, who would otherwise be deprived
of such advancement opportunity.
As
in the previous four courses, all lessons and assessments will be conducted
online and the students will have the opportunity to participate in online
discussions with the lecturers and volunteer teaching assistants. Topics covered
include Genomics and Computational Molecular Biology Genomics, An Overview of the
Computational Analysis of Biological Sequences, Comparative Genomics, Transcript
Analysis, Representations and Algorithms for Computational Molecular Biology, Protein
and Nucleic Acid Structure, Dynamics, and Engineering, Protein Structure Primer,
Protein Structure Prediction, Structure Prediction for Macromolecular Interactions,
Protein-Ligand Modeling, Proteomics, Proteomes: Proteins Expressed as a Genome,
Protein Physics, Microarray Data Analysis with reowned professors including
Russ Altman, Michael Levitt, Douglas Brutlag, Subbiah S, Liping Wei, Winston Hide,
Shoba Ranganathan, Betty Cheng, Julie Mitchell, Lynn Ten Eyck, Marc Wilkins,
Jan-Olov.Hoog and Mark Reimers.
This year, the S* Alliance is pleased to announce the inclusion of more
hands-on tutorials as well as a new Problem-Based Learning (PBL) module
to encourage hand-on and critical thinking among participants through
participation of group projects. "At the end of the PBL, we hope to encourage
participants to engage the problems they face in life and career with initiative
and enthusiasm and to instill the participants with the sense of team sprit and
co-operation" said S* Chairperson, Professor Shoba Ranganathan. For a start,
the PBLs will be conducted on an experimental basis, through the Internet
low-bandwidth audio-conferencing system at emeet.nus.edu.sg, facilitated by the
Centre for Instructional Technology, National University of Singapore.
In recent months, the S* Alliance have been receiving numerous requests by
teaching institutions to adopt S* course material as a component of their
teaching materials. Many institutions have also requested to mirror the
S* course material locally. At the same time, many participants have expressed
an interest in having transcripts to certify to their own institutions that they
have successfully completed S* online courses. To provide an added incentive for
students to work hard at the online courses, the S* Secretariat is pleased to
announce that S* Transcripts will be issued by the Secretariat on behalf of all
the alliance members for future participants with effect from April 2004.
A transcript processing fee of US$50 will be levied to cover administration
and postage costs. Otherwise, the S* course is entirely free.
About S* Alliance
S* Alliance is a collaboration among top
universities/institutes in five continents, namely University of Sydney in
Australia; Karolinska Institutet and University of Uppsala, in Sweden;
National University of Singapore in Asia; South Africa National
Bioinformatics Institute, University of the Western Cape, South Africa,
and Stanford University, USA plus a recent addition, University of
California San Diego (USCD). The S*Star group of teaching institutions
have formed a global alliance to provide a global, unified bioinformatics
learning environment (GLOBULE) made up of modular courses in the
disciplines of genomics, bioinformatics, and medical informatics. It is
best known for its S* Alliance Online Bioinformatics Course
http://www.s-star.org/.
About APBioNet
The Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet)
is a non-profit, non-governmental, international organization founded in
1998. It focuses on the promotion of bioinformatics in the Asia Pacific
Region. Since 1998, its mission has been to pioneer the growth and
development of bioinformatics awareness, training, education,
infrastructure, resources and research amongst member countries and
economies. APBioNet has more than 20 organizational and 400 individual
members from over 12 countries in the Asia Pacific region, and members
include those from industry, academia, research, government, investors and
international organizations. APBioNet has coordinated or co-organized more
than 20 international and national meetings in cooperation with members in
different economies. It is spearheading a number of key bioinformatics
initiatives in the region in collaboration with international
organizations such as APAN, APEC, S* Alliance and A-IMBN. More about
APBioNet can be found at: http://www.apbionet.org/.
Press Contact
Victor Tong
S* Course Coordinator
Email:
victor@s-star.org
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