BME celebrates 20th anniversary of bioinformatics program

Meghan King | Posted on October 09, 2024
  6. Xiang (Sean) Li gives his speech about “Leveraging Bioinformatics Training For Business Innovation - A Personal Journey of Problem Solving In Business
    Jim Young/ UIC Engineering
    Xiang (Sean) Li gives his speech about “Leveraging Bioinformatics Training For Business Innovation - A Personal Journey of Problem Solving In Business"

The UIC Bioinformatics 20th Anniversary Symposium was held this spring by the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering to celebrate the program and reflect on its history.

The department is the home of the oldest bioinformatics doctoral and master’s degree programs in the state and was first approved by the Illinois Board of Higher Education in 2003. The program is one of the oldest in the nation, and this celebration was a recognition of its growth and its current success.

Organizer, BME Clinical Assistant Professor, and Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology Associate Director Meishan Lin said that the current students who attended this event were very excited to meet their lab alums, who are well-established and successful, and get advice from these alumni to plan for their future.

The program’s creation also brought the establishment of research labs in bioinformatics, which was unconventional at the time among BME departments, noted Richard and Loan Hill Professor and UIC Distinguished Professor Jie Liang.

The symposium also included presentations from alumni describing their most recent work and poster presentations from students and postdoctoral fellows about their research.

The core faculty of the bioinformatics program include UIC Distinguished Professor and Richard and Loan Hill Professor Jie Liang, Professor Yang Dai, Clinical Assistant Professor Meishan Lin, Associate Professor Ao Ma, Assistant Professor Zhangli Peng, and Assistant Professor Beatriz Peñalver-Bernabé.

Some of the alumni presenters included Columbia University in New York Assistant Professor Gamze Gürsoy, Google Senior Research Scientist Ahmed Metwally, KarmaSci Scientific Consulting LLC Consultant and Liaison Dennis Bergau, Seqster CTO and Co-Founder Xiang (Sean) Li, Washington University School of Medicine Professor Nathan Stitziel, Loyola University Director of Loyola Genomics Facility Peter Larson, Sangamo Therapeutics Inc Vice President of Bioinformatics Hsiao-Mei Lu, and Insilicom LLC CEO and Florida State University Professor Jinfeng Zhang.

The event was hosted by the UIC Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology.