Welcome to the 16th annual conference of the Midsouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) on the campus of the University of Alabama at Birmingham! MCBIOS’19 is a premier, annual gathering for bioinformaticians, computational biologists and biological data scientists throughout the Midwest and Southeast regions of the United States. On behalf of MCBIOS and the MCBIOS ’19 organizing committee, I hope you will have a pleasant time in and around Birmingham.

This year, we will meet to focus the conference theme, “Informatics for Precision Medicine,” to showcase research breakthroughs, tool development and biomedical applications in this rapidly emerging topic of national interest. Aiming to improve patient response, biomedical researchers in precision medicine increasingly resort to analyzing individual-level data, including those collected from multiple omics platforms, clinical visits or mobile devices. This trend brings forth new informatics challenges in biomedical data representation, data standardization, data integration, data processing, data modeling, data sharing, knowledge discovery, and translational applications. I am excited that many of you, experts in various informatics subjects above, will report at the conference biomedical data science research advancements in clinical genomic knowledge-base, healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) decision making software, disease therapeutic simulation algorithms, mobile health apps and many more subjects. Our work today will profoundly impact how we and our children interact with healthcare systems of the future.

While in Birmingham, we hope you enjoy the beautiful spring weather, fine dining, national historical sites, state parks and Southern hospitality.

We thank our various sponsors, including UAB School of Medicine, UAB Informatics Institute, O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at UAB, UAB Center for Clinical and Translational Science, UAB Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute, and BBVA Compass Bank, and particularly, MCBIOS for their generous support of our conference.

Again, a warm welcome and my very best wishes to an enjoyable stay in Birmingham!

Sincerely yours,

Jake Y. Chen, Ph.D.
MCBIOS '19 General Chair
Birmingham, AL