By itself, the number of revolutions around the sun does not intrinsically call for anything special. Yet, we decided to seize the opportunity to celebrate the birth of bioinformatics and organize activities to a broad audience: both laymen and scientific.

Learn about cool science

We have concocted a nice brew of events to meet each other, to learn about cool science and also to put Paulien Hogeweg and our Utrecht bioinformatics community in the spotlight. We will kick off on 20 February 2020 with three keynotes who will share their personal experiences in the field of bioinformatics. Many other activities for the general public, students and researchers are scheduled, ending with the yearly UBC symposium which will be fully themed in light of the past 50 years. You can find descriptions and dates for all these activities on our special 50 years bioinformatics web page. 

Pervasiveness of bioinformatics

Further in this newsletter, you can find two interviews on this special occasion. These interviews highlight the pervasiveness of bioinformatics in modern life sciences from improving crops to fighting human disease. In a series of three interviews, NEMOkennislink emphatically demonstrates the tight integration of bioinformatics into the life sciences and the interesting future ahead with ever more complex data and more complex approaches such as machine learning to be able to deal with these data. Bioinformatics is very alive as also demonstrated by the two ERC consolidator grants awarded to two UBC group leaders Bas Dutilh and Ruben van Boxtel.