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The Northern California Computational Biology (NCCB) Student Symposium is a one­-day student symposium organized by the NCCB Planning Committee made up of students from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UCSF, and Stanford. The symposium offers an excellent opportunity to connect with the local computational biology student community and to learn about current research projects involving the many facets of computational biology. Our program will also include presentations from a UC Berkeley faculty member and an industry bioinformatics researcher.

Faculty Keynote Speaker

pachterDr. Lior Pachter, University of California, Berkeley Professor of Electrical Engineer & Computer Science, Molecular & Cell Biology, and Mathematics

Dr. Lior Pachter’s research focuses on functional genomics and the development of algorithms and methodology in computational biology. He has previously worked in comparative genomics with the use of phylogenetic methods and has contributed to research in the mouse, rat, chicken, and fly genomes. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT. Dr. Lior Pachter has made several contributions in computational biology as a professor at UC Berkeley, where he held the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair in Computational Biology, and will continue doing so as a professor at Caltech starting next year.

Industry Keynote Speaker

Hinco_GiermanDr. Hinco Gierman, Team Lead Scientific Software, Illumina Inc.

Dr. Hinco Gierman is the Team Lead for both Scientific software products of Illumina’s Precision Medicine Platform. More than half of the Top25 Global Pharma companies use this software, which has been referenced by more than 600 papers. Dr. Gierman’s interest is in the development of computational biology tools for biomarker discovery, and he and his team won the People’s Choice Award for their Cohort Analyzer Software at the Bio-IT World Conference.

Dr. Gierman received his Bachelor of Biotechnological Engineering and MSc in Molecular Biology from Wageningen University, and his Ph.D. in Human Genetics and Oncogenomics from the University of Amsterdam. As a Research Fellow at Stanford University, he studied the genetics of ageing and age-related disease before joining Illumina Inc. He also worked at or consulted for other companies in Oncology research and taught courses at several universities.

Event Organizers

najar Carlos Fernando Buen Abad Najar, UC Berkeley
Computational Biology
brooke.brighter Brooke Rhead, UC Berkeley
Computational Biology
xu Chenling Xu, UC Berkeley
Computational Biology
colleen-bosworth-nccb Colleen Bosworth, UC Santa Cruz
Biomolecular Engineering
ashmitha-rajendran-nccb Ashmitha Rajendran, UC Santa Cruz
Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics
william-ridley-nccb William Ridley, UC Santa Cruz
Bioengineering and Bioinformatics
darrin-schultz-nccb Darrin Schultz, UC Santa Cruz
Biomolecular Engineering
diego-garrido-ruiz-nccb Diego Garrido Ruiz, UC San Francisco
Biophysics
rohit-vashisht-nccb Rohit Vashisht, Stanford University
Biomedical Informatics