The purpose of the program group is to organize speakers for the monthly meetups and the quarterly seminars. Respond to this thread or contact Doug directly if you would like to help out.

Our target for each monthly meetup should be to identify one person to deliver a half hour presentation on a topic that would generally be of interest to the group, and to encourage others to present lightning talks.

Our target for the quarterly seminar should be to recruit one person of prominence in the field to deliver a one hour presentation that will be of general interest to the group.

Please suggest speakers from the Bay Area unless you happen to know that someone will be travelling to the Bay Area at a specific time.

Also, it is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged to volunteer yourself as a speaker.

Here is the schedule of speakers, so far:

February (quarterly): Oliver Fiehn, UC Davis - "Towards a Standardized Metabolomics Repository"
http://fiehnlab.ucdav...

March (meetup): Oscar Alviso, Codexis - Computational Protein Design
http://www.pnas.org/c...

Please respond to this thread with any suggestions you have.

Speaker Suggestion

Speaker: Dr. Peter Karp (SRI International)
Fields: Genomics and metabolic reconstruction and modeling
Recent Papers: Machine learning methods for metabolic pathway prediction.
The MetaCyc database of metabolic pathways and enzymes and the BioCyc collection of pathway/genome databases.
Pathway Tools version 13.0: integrated software for pathway/genome informatics and systems biology
BayBIFX Member: No
Quarterly or Monthly: Quarterly
Possible contacts: I know Peter from my work at the UMBBD. I would be happy to contact him and gauge his interest in speaking to the group.

Speaker Suggestion

Speaker: Dr. Ruchira Datta (Berkeley)
Fields: Phylogenomics
Recent Papers:Berkeley PHOG: PhyloFacts orthology group prediction web server
BayBIFX Member: Yes
Quarterly or Monthly: Monthly
Possible contacts: ???

Speaker Suggestion

Speaker: Dr. Ruchira Datta (Berkeley)

Dr. Datta has agreed in principal to talk at one of our forums this spring. This is especially exciting for me as I have recently been doing some work that requires some more heavy duty Phylogenetics work including her PHOG tool.

Topic Suggestion: Cell Signaling Pathways
From Rita Lim-Wilby via the Idea Tracker: http://www.baybifx.co...

I think that this is a great idea. It is a growing field and one where I think there is significant interest and some confusion. Here's what I would propose we do. (BTW I think that in general these would be good step to take for any new topic ideas).

1) Identify people in the group who have some level of expertise in this area (SME)
a) Some kind of user survey might be useful in general for this. I will look into that.
2) Send out a request to identified SME's to either talk at a future forum or propose someone in the field who would be good to talk in the forum (outside expert, OE)
3) Either schedule a member to talk or contact list of OEs and ask them to speak. (SME's or other who have contacts in this field can do this. I am always willing to cold call speakers if another connection cannot be found)

We don't have to wait for step 1 to do steps 2 or 3.

If you work in the field of Cell Signaling Pathways, or just have a high level of knowledge in this field (SME's), please respond to this message and let us know.

If you know of someone who would be good to talk on this topic. Please respond to this message. Please don't share other people's non-public contact information on this forum, we can take care of that via e-mail.

So anyone with any ideas, please share.

Thanks

Doug

I got around to making an online poll on Survey Monkey for Cell Signaling Pathways

http://www.surveymonk...

Please fill it out.

I'm still playing around with what the best way would be to do this. Meet up's surveys don't allow for complicated questions and don't show where the answers came from. I'm just testing out Survey Monkey so I'm not sure if that will work either.

Anyone who has experience with surveys, and especially a professional Survey Monkey (or other survey site) account on which they would be willing to donate space, please let us know.