Seminars, Informal Courses, Group Meetings, and Symposia
As well as formally structured courses and research rotations, graduate students will have access to seminars, group meetings and informal sessions during which they will have frequent opportunities to interact closely with faculty mentors and to present their research plans, problems, and findings. In addition to weekly Bioinformatics seminars, the graduate program will launch monthly student/faculty meetings at which students can present their research findings and discuss their progress. Graduate students will also be expected organize an annual symposium where they will invite leading researchers to UCSD for one-day talks and discussions.

Besides the activities noted above, UCSD as a premier research institution, has many excellent seminar programs sponsored by every research department and organized research group. Several interdisciplinary programs facilitate research meetings. Notable ones include, the La Jolla Interfaces in Sciences (LJIS) Program, the Neurosciences Program, the Molecular Biophysics Program, the Whitaker Institute for Biomedical Engineering, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Structural Genomics Program. LJIS, for example, is an extremely successful interdisciplinary program sponsoring stimulating and state-of-the-art seminars. LJIS recently sponsored a well-received symposium on Post-Genomic Bioinformatics. Many program faculty are involved in several of the areas mentioned above and we anticipate the Bioinformatics graduate program will benefit from all of these additional programs and symposia.