Mandated: COVID-19 Vaccine for all participants

The field of biology has always been a systems science discipline. Human physiology, which dates back to Hippocrates in the 4th century B.C., dealt with life as a system. Systems Biology provides an integrated and quantitative approach for combining biological components, their interaction networks and phenotypes to provide models that can be used to both design new experiments and map quantitatively the response of the system to perturbations. It would be superfluous to say that network biology is one of the pillars of systems biology—after all, a major objective of systems biology is to characterize system-wide networks that upon activation result in given phenotypes. In addition to interaction networks that are almost the bane of systems biology, contextual networks that provide rich information on flow of information and metabolites in a cellular system are now becoming common place in scientific literature. Finally, ever since the dawn of scientific times, life scientists, have created working models of systems with the objective of both understanding and manipulating them. These models have almost always arisen from a physical picture the scientist develops either based on his or her own observations and measurements or integration of legacy knowledge with one’s own intuition. Darwin’s natural selection is essentially a model built on systematic observations and serves to provide insights into evolution of species. With high throughput technologies, we can measure today, components of living systems in very minute detail and this can form the basis for investigating whole systems instead of small parts of the system. Our conference features researchers who bring the components, the interactions, the mechanisms, the networks, the phenotypes, the models of diverse living systems in normal and pathological states and provide deep insights into the future of biology.