The 2nd Annual DREAM (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) conference has been announced and will be held December 3 and 4, 2007 at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York, NY.

The conference will feature several speakers including: Tim Gardner, Ravi Iyengar, Fritz Roth, Chris Sander, Ron Shamir, Ilya Shmulevich, Mike Snyder, Peter Sorger, Ioannis Xenarios; as well as a presentation of accepted papers.

Also to be discussed will be the DREAM Challenge, which consists of 5 separate challenges composed of one or more datasets which participants used to generate predictions as to the best possible network from which the data originated. All predictions and results will be disclosed at the conference.

Update, February 28, 2008: For a report on this conference, see the New York Academy of Sciences eBriefing, Educated Guesses: The Second Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM).

geWorkbench, the bioinformatics platform of the MAGNet Center, was recognized with an excellence award during the 2007 annual meeting of the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) initiative. The geWorkbench project team was sited for "excellence in the design, planning and implementation of one of the first unrestricted open-source software projects from integrative genomics analysis."

Barry Honig, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics and Director of C2B2, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in an October 6 ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Academy is an independent research center conducting multidisciplinary studies of problems in science, technology, and global security; social policy and American institutions; the humanities and culture; and education.

Dana Pe'er, Assistant Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, has joined C2B2. Prof. Pe'er's research focuses on understanding the organization, function, and evolution of molecular networks. Molecular networks sense multiple signals from the environment, robustly process appropriate cellular responses and orchestrate the regulation of hundreds of genes and proteins to execute these responses. This remarkable functionality occurs through diverse mechanisms including regulation of transcription, epigenetic changes, translation, degradation, post-translational signaling, and localization. Prof. Pe'er's lab develops computational methods to integrate diverse high throughput data and unravel a holistic systems level view of the cell in an attempt to answer such questions as: How does this calculation differ between cell-type, individual and species? How do small changes to the regulatory network propagate and manifest in phenotypic diversity and changes? What is the connection between regulation and fitness? How does dysfunctional regulation lead to disease such as cancer? 

Prof. Pe'er is a graduate of the Hebrew University. Before joining Columbia in 2006 she held a Research fellow appointment at George Church's lab, Dept. of Genetics, Harvard Medical School