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Workshop challenges high school students

A dozen students from Canisius, East, and Orchard Park high schools, Mount Saint Mary and Holy Angels academies, and Nichols School participated in UB’s annual high school workshop in computational science for two weeks this summer. As part of CCR's effort to reach out to populations underrepresented in the sciences, five of the participants were female.

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 a 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, director of CCR and research associate professor of chemistry.

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

This was the first year that the workshop was 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.

Named in memory of student

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 Feb. 27 after a brief illness. A son of Marcia and E. Bruce Pitman, Eric was 14 at the time of his death.
           
CCR and Center of Excellence staff led by Furlani and Norma J. Nowak, 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.

"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.

Computer science and research

Nowak communicated those ideas to workshop participants in a special lecture. 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.

Participants 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."

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.