This came through on the BCIG wire and I thought it may be of interest to readers with interests in biocomputing, bioinformatics, and the like.

A Lifetime of Biomedical Computing: A Conversation with Robert Ledley

February 21, 2008, 3:00 p.m.

Building 38A, Lister Hill Auditorium

Event Description:

Dr. Robert S. Ledley, founder of the National Biomedical Research Foundation (NBRF) and Professor of Radiology, Physiology, and Biophysics at the Georgetown University Medical Center, will hold a conversation with Dr. Joseph November, Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina’s Department of History and the current DeWitt Stetten, Jr. Memorial Fellow, titled “A Lifetime of Biomedical Computing: A Conversation with Robert Ledley,” on Thursday February 21, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. in the Lister Hill Auditorium (Building 38A).

Ledley and November will discuss Ledley’s remarkable career as a biomedical computing pioneer and the consequences of his decades-long effort to harness computer technology to advance biology and medicine.

An expert in mathematics, physics, electronic engineering, and dentistry, Ledley will share his unique insights into developments (often initiated by Ledley himself) in computing and biomedical research over the last fifty years.

Though he is best known for developing the first whole-body CT scanner in the 1970s, Ledley’s vision of computing has shaped many other areas of biomedicine since the 1950s. In addition to developing computers that automated chromosome analysis, medical diagnosis, and medical image processing, Ledley and his collaborators at the NBRF created the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure and the Protein Information Resource, thereby helping to lay the groundwork for GenBank.

More details after the jump…

About the Speaker:

Dr. Ledley has been the head of the NBRF since he founded it in 1960 and a well-known pioneer in the field of biomedical computing. In the late 1940s, he simultaneously trained as a dentist at New York University and as a physicist at Columbia University. After working with some of the earliest digital electronic computers at the National Bureau of Standards in the early 1950s, Ledley dedicated his career to using computers to solve problems in biology.

This presentation is sponsored by the Office of NIH History. For more information about the BRHIG and upcoming events, please visit the websites at http://history.nih.gov or http://www.nih.gov/sigs/brhig.

NIH Visitor information:

See http://www.nih.gov/about/visitorsecurity.htm and http://parking.nih.gov/visitor_access_map.htm.

For more information or special accommodations, please contact Deborah Kraut at 301–496-8856 or krautd@mail.nih.gov.