Suggested Reading/Viewing before the Workshop

The parts directly relevant to the workshop are in bold.

Background Material

The workshop will give the participants hands-on experience in the cutting edge of biology and computational modeling of complex biological systems.  Modeling requires familiarity with concepts from numerous fields including Mathematics, Computer Science, and, naturally, Biology.  Unfortunately, relatively few professional scientists can claim to be equally proficient in all of these fields.  Our hope is that the workshop will inspire a new generation of scientists who will one day use modeling to solve some of the most challenging open problems in Biology. The following references are provided as background material.

Computer Tools

Modeling

Biology

The main material that we will use in this section is the second bullet point, on Hallmarks of Cancer. The first bullet point is introductory information, which I hope will help to read the later material. The final bullet point is motivational material.

Notes on Reading Wikipedia articles

Several of the above links take you to wikipedia articles. You may be concerned about the credibility of these articles. If you are, it may be somewhat surprising to you that the quality of the technical articles tends to be quite good, especially in fields where there is neither political controversy nor strong economic interest.

Sometimes, you can get more feeling for the quality of a wikipedia article by clicking on the "Discussion" tab that appears at the top of the article. You will see that most of the above articles are part of larger efforts to systematize the information in major areas of knowledge such as "Molecular and Cellular Biology" and "Medicine".

Be a little slow to follow links, they can get you totally distracted; you might read through an article first to get the general sense, and then go back and follow links that look interesting or helpful.