PROJECT SUMMARY This proposal seeks support for the conference on Systems Biology: Networks, to take place March 14-18, 2017, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). This meeting, held biennially on the CSHL campus in New York, brings together senior and junior scientists from both experimental and computational laboratories with common interests in network biology. The 2017 meeting will emphasize new discoveries and provide an open forum for the presentation of the latest research and results on molecular networks and their relevance to normal and abnormal cellular physiology. It will be essential for advancing knowledge in all aspects of the network modeling process, from data generation in experimental cell biology to data analysis and computer simulation and from the development and validation of network models describing these data to biological inferences made from the models. The conference will include platform sessions on gene regulatory networks; interaction networks; networks and disease; microbial, metabolic and synthetic networks; signaling networks; modeling network dynamics; and network pharmacology, though the exact program for the meeting will be assembled after the abstract submission deadline in January 2017. This conference will include significant components designed to facilitate the active participation of younger scientists such as selection of platform speakers on the basis of the scientific merit of their submitted abstracts as well as poster presentations. The intimate environment at CSHL also fosters active participation by all. Finally, women, who have historically comprised approximately 36% of the meeting attendees, will also be well represented. At the time of submission, 1 of the 4 organizers for the 2017 meeting and 8 of the 16 invited speakers (50%) are women.

Biological systems are characterized by complex networks of interactions between molecular components. Thus, elucidating the structure and function of these networks and understanding how they become dysregulated to cause disease are critical steps toward improving human health. This application seeks support for the 2017 conference on Systems Biology: Networks to be held March 14-18 at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which will bring experimental and computational biologists together to discuss emerging results in the field.