The Institute for Genomic Biology

My name is Victor Jongeneel, I'm a computational biologist, and my role at the University of Illinois is to try to get computational scientists and biologists to talk to each other. And, to make the Institute for Genomic Biology and NCSA relevant to each other and get them to enter a cooperative mode to develop computational biology on campus. Biology is becoming increasingly a data driven science. Biologists generate large amounts of data and they're usually not really trained to handle this data and to analyze them. They have to work together with computational scientists not only to make sense of the data but also to manage them, to mine them, to find patterns in them, and so forth. I think biology has entered a phase for a few years now where it is intimately linked to computational science, but this is not yet become what I would call organic in the sense that the two worlds often find it difficult to talk to each other. Biomedical researchers will tell you about data types they are connecting and they will tell you about questions they are trying to answer based on the information that is contained in this data. Computational scientists like to talk about methods and algorithms and how they implement them on particular machine architectures. And, you need a little bit of understanding of how these two different cultures mesh together to be able to see that this particular type of computer or this particular type of approach of algorithm might be a good fit to answer. You can get the rest of Victor's interview at the NCSA website: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Video/2011/victor.html