Program Finalized for First International HealthGrid meeting to be held in U.S., June 2-4, 2008

[Mary Kratz <mkratz@xxxxxxxxx>]

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PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
For more information: _info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:info@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Program Finalized for First International HealthGrid meeting to be held
in U.S., June 2-4, 2008




The HealthGrid U.S. Alliance has finalized the program for the sixth
annual International HealthGrid conference - the first one to be held in
the United States, “Global HealthGrid: eScience Meets Biomedical
Informatics.”



"As the first HealthGrid conference in the America's, this is an
historic event," says Jonathan Silverstein, M.D., President,
HealthGrid.US, and Associate Director, Computation Institute,
Argonne/University of Chicago. "The program will appeal broadly to the
interdisciplinary eScience and biomedical informatics communities,
including physicians, medical educators, students, epidemiologists,
biomedical informaticians, military medicine specialists, computer
scientists, security and policy makers, economists, and futurists.”

The conference begins on June 2 with a day of workshops and tutorials
which will provide training and demonstrations, including basic Grid
concepts, case studies and the most advanced topics on infrastructure
and applications for computational biologists and public health
informaticians.



The formal conference will kick-off on June 3, with welcoming remarks
by Robert J. Zimmer, Ph.D., President of the University of Chicago.
 Following the welcoming ceremonies, Ian Foster, Ph.D., will provide a
keynote presentation on "eScience meets Biomedical Informatics."
Scientific papers will be complemented with a roundtable discussion from
U.S., European, and Asian government leaders on "Government eScience and
Cyberinfrastructure Programs for HealthGrid," moderated by Michael
Cowan, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, Bearing Point, and former U.S. Navy
Surgeon General. Cowan will precede the government roundtable discussion
with a keynote presentation on "The Role of Government in the Future
Knowledge Society."

"The main importance of the meeting, apart from communicating
information about research programs, is for partners to meet and
network.  The annual HealthGrid conference provides an opportunity to
plan and prepare for future joint collaborations of global scale." says
Vincent Breton, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and
co-chair of the Program Committee.

The final day of the conference provides a major networking opportunity,
starting with a keynote presentation by Peter Hunter, Ph.D., director,
The Bioengineering Institute, University of Aukland, on the "Physiome
Project," a worldwide public domain effort to provide a computational
framework for understanding human and other eukaryotic physiology, i.e.,
organisms whose cells are organized into complex structures enclosed
within membranes. It aims to develop integrative models at all levels of
biological organization, from genes to the whole organism via gene
regulatory networks, protein pathways, integrative cell function, and
tissue and whole organ structure/function relations.

Because public private partnerships become increasingly important to
global science, an industry roundtable will provide business models for
HealthGrid in the emerging knowledge economy and the impact of industry
innovation.

The closing session will highlight perspectives from GridAsia, by Simon
Lin, Ph.D., Academia Sinica, Taiwan, as the HealthGrid continues to
expand globally. "The international networking aspects of the HealthGrid
benefit a broad range of biomedical informatics programs," says Mary
Kratz, Executive Vice President of the HealthGrid.US Alliance and Senior
Information Services Specialist, University of Michigan. "We are
delighted with the strong work of the Program Committee to bring
together an outstanding program for HealthGrid 2008." The selected
papers will be published in the series /Studies in Health Technology and
Informatics/, IOS Press (_http://www.iospress.nl/_), and referenced in
MEDLINE.



The HealthGrid conference is the premier conference on the
transformation of biomedical research, education and medical care
through the application of Grid technologies. HealthGrid is dedicated to
enhancing biomedical research and healthcare delivery, creating an open
collaborative virtual community, and communicating the collective
knowledge of the HealthGrid. Scheduling and other conference details can
be found at _http://chicago2008.healthgrid.org/_.