The University's graduate school has approved (pending confirmation by the Board of Regents expected in February) a new graduate minor in bioinformatics. In Bioinformatics, one applies or invents computing science to solve existing or emerging biological problems.

This minor stems from the ferment at the interface between the computing sciences, broadly defined, and the biological sciences. A goodly number of faculty across the University perform interdisciplinary, bioinformatics re-search and have taught courses with bioinformatics content. Now, with the creation of several new courses, and the support of faculty and administration from five colleges, students can opt to enroll in a recognized Bioinformatics program.

John Carlis, George Karypis and Daniel Boley from Computer Science served on the University -wide committee that brought this minor to fruition. They also serve on the minor's graduate faculty, and teach courses that are part of the minor.

The masters minor program consists of three core courses. The Ph.D. minor consists of the core plus one of two statistical genomics courses and one course, not in the students major, taken from a list of relevant electives. The following courses are part of the minor (with their likely instructor): CSCI 5481 Computational Techniques for Genomics (Karypis); CSCI 5707 Principles of Database Systems (Carlis); CSCI 5521 Pattern Recognition (Boley); CSCI 8705 Scientific Databases and Applications (Carlis).

To kick off the minor, on April 26, 2002, there will be a day-long symposium titled "Bioinformatics: Building Bridges." We are particularly interested in having students interested in the minor attend the symposium. To help make that happen registration is free (so is lunch!). The symposium's program includes talks by U of M Bioinformatics professors, plus four renowned external speakers.

For more on the minor and the symposium see: http://www.binf.umn.edu.

-John Carlis