Media advisory: Western New York high school students are learning how big data is transforming healthcare

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Roughly a dozen high school students are getting a crash course on how the information age is improving healthcare and helping Buffalo develop a world-class medical corridor.

Part of an annual summer computing workshop, the students learned how University at Buffalo researcher Norma Nowak uses supercomputers for genomic research. They learned how Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute studies proteins to determine what causes diseases.

And on Monday, they’ll learn how researchers and doctors are applying information and computer science to improve health care. The students will have a discussion with Peter Winkelstein, MD, executive director of the Institute for Healthcare Informatics in UB’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Media are invited to join the students. Here are the details:

When: 10:45 a.m. Monday, July 7.

Where: UB’s Center for Computational Research on the first floor of the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, 701 Ellicott St., Buffalo.

The activities are part of UB’s Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science, a two-week long program that introduces high school science students to the use of computer modeling and simulation to solve science and engineering problems.

UB’s Center for Computational Research has hosted the workshop every year since 1999. Since 2007, it has been held in honor of Eric Pitman, who was a freshman at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute when he passed away in 2007 after a brief illness.

“The workshop immerses students into some of the most exciting and cutting-edge science that’s happening in their backyard,” said E. Bruce Pitman, dean of UB’s College of Arts and Sciences and Eric Pitman’s father. “It also shows them that opportunities exist here for wonderful careers in science and engineering.”