Give up those full hue heat map colors! Make images of biological data that even a grandmother can love! How about posters that no longer require an advanced degree to decipher? These platitudes and more coming next March, when I’ll be giving a keynote at the EMBO Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data in Heidelberg. Actually, I won’t be talking about any of those three things (though there’s a good chance I’ll talk about things like this), but registration is now open for participants:

Dear colleagues,

We invite you to participate in the first EMBO Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data (VizBi) 3 – 5 March 2010 at the EMBL’s new Advanced Training Centre in Heidelberg, Germany.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together, for the first time, researchers developing and using visualization systems across all areas of biology, including genomics, sequence analysis, macromolecular structures, systems biology, and imaging (including microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging). We have assembled an authoritative list of 29 invited speakers who will present an exciting program, reviewing the state-of-the-art and perspectives in each of these areas. The primary focus will be on visualizing processed and annotated data in their biological context, rather than on processing of raw data.

The workshop is limited in the total number participants, and each participant is normally required to present a poster and to give a ‘fastforward’ presentation about their work (limited to 30 seconds and 1 slide).

To apply to join the workshop, please go to http://vizbi.org and submit an abstract and image related to your work. Submissions close on 16 November 2009. Since places are limited, participants will be selected based on the relevance of their work to the goals of the workshop.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent within three weeks after the close of submissions.

We plan to award a prize for the submitted image that best conveys a strong scientific message in a visually compelling manner.

Please forward this announcement to anyone who may be interested. We hope to see you in Heidelberg next spring!

Seán O’Donoghue, EMBL
Jim Procter, University of Dundee
Nils Gehlenborg, European Bioinformatics Institute
Reinhard Schneider, EMBL

If you have any questions about the registration process please contact:

Adela Valceanu

Conference Officer
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Meyerhofstr. 1
D-69117 Heidelberg
Tel: +49-6221-387 8625
Fax: +49-6221-387 8158
Email: valceanu@embl.de

For full event listings please visit our website or sign up for our newsletter.

Which also reminds me, I oughta finish cooking a few back-burner genetics projects before they go bad…