Workshop in Computational Science Challenges High School Students

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A dozen lucky high school students are spending two weeks this summer at the University at Buffalo's Center for Computational Research, part of the university's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, during its annual high school workshop in computational science, from June 25 to July 6.

Twelve students from Canisius, East and Orchard Park high schools, Mount Saint Mary and Holy Angels academies and Nichols School are participating in the workshop. As part of CCR's effort to reach out to populations underrepresented in the sciences, five of the participants are female.

This is the first year that the workshop is being held at the Center of Excellence since CCR moved its headquarters there last summer. So, in addition to having the opportunity to learn on state-of-the-art computing and visualization hardware, workshop students will have a chance to experience the city's state-of-the-art scientific facilities on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, including those at the Center of Excellence, the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute and Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

The focus of the workshop is to teach students the basics of bioinformatics -- the interface where life science meets computational science -- by challenging them to program computers and search a genomic database.

"The workshop is one of few in the U.S. where high school students learn computer programming, database design and biology in a structured program, all the pieces that go into a modern research program in bioinformatics," said Tom Furlani, Ph.D., director of CCR and UB research associate professor of chemistry.

"Indeed, in the final few days of the two-week workshop, the students work in groups on a research project, culminating with a presentation of their results on the workshop's final day."

This year, CCR renamed its annual summer high school workshop the Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science in memory of Eric Pitman, a freshman at St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute, who died on

Feb. 27 after a brief illness. A son of Marcia and E. Bruce Pitman, Eric was 14 at the time of his death.

Since 1999, E. Bruce Pitman, Ph.D., associate dean for research and sponsored programs in UB's College of Arts and Sciences and UB professor of mathematics, has coordinated the workshop at CCR, one of the nation's leading academic supercomputing sites.

CCR and Center of Excellence staff led by Furlani and Norma J. Nowak, Ph.D., director of science and technology at the Center of Excellence, associate professor of biochemistry and director of the microarray and genomics facility at RPCI, decided to name the workshop in honor of Eric.

"We wanted to find a way to honor Bruce's son," said Nowak. "He was such a talented young man in all areas of his life, not just intellectually, but he rowed crew, he ran, he loved music, he was a lot like his dad. And he would have loved the chance for an opportunity like this workshop."

"Eric would have been just the type of student CCR seeks for this workshop," Furlani agreed.

Nowak had the opportunity to meet Eric last June when, as part of the grand opening celebration for the UB Center of Excellence, he attended a special program for middle and high school students who had participated in Science Olympiad tournaments.

Eric understood the philosophy behind the Center of Excellence, Nowak said, that there are links between doing research, developing diagnostic tools and creating businesses in Western New York and that young people can be part of it whether their interests lay in science or business or in other areas.

Nowak communicated those ideas to workshop participants in a special lecture at 1 p.m. today. She also discussed the Human Genome Project and the role that Buffalo played in the sequencing of the human genome through her efforts and those of her colleagues at Roswell Park.

Participants will come away from the workshop with a better understanding of why computer science is so critical to scientific research, Nowak said.

"They are seeing how modern research in biology results in the generation of enormous databases containing hundreds of thousands to millions of data points," she said. "They are learning that they can attack biological problems by using the power of computer science to help sift through the data points in order to find trends and new discoveries that would not be possible without computers."

Additional lectures during the workshop will be given by Marc Halfon, Ph.D., UB assistant professor of biochemistry and biological sciences, who studies gene regulatory elements in DNA sequences, using the fruit fly as a model system, and Zihua Hu, Ph.D., bioinformatics computational scientist at CCR and adjunct assistant professor in the departments of biostatistics and medicine in the UB schools of Public Health and Health Professions and Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, who will discuss the "nuts and bolts" of bioinformatics.

The workshop, which also involves teachers from East High School and Buffalo Public School 19, the Native American magnet school, is one of several CCR initiatives designed to bring bioinformatics and computational science into Western New York high schools.

CCR's "Next Generation Scientists" project, supported by grants from Verizon and Maureen Rasp-Glose, involves UB faculty members Furlani and Pitman, as well as local teachers Doug Happ, Greg Hylkema and Adam Ziccardi of Orchard Park High School and Teri Logan of Mount Saint Mary Academy, in an effort to develop high school curriculum in computational science. Materials in both bioinformatics and in programming have been developed and are available for high school teachers to use at https://bioinformatics.ccr.buffalo.edu/workshop/bioinformatics/Portal/.

For more information on the Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science, please go to http://www.ccr.buffalo.edu/Workshop07/wkshop_07.html.