This is an invitation to submit proposals for workshops at the 31st Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), to be held January 3-7, 2026 on the Kohala Coast, the Big Island of Hawaii. PSB will bring together top researchers from the US, the Asian Pacific nations and around the world to exchange research for the presentation of work in databases, algorithms, interfaces, natural language processing, modeling and other computational methods, as applied to biological problems, with emphasis on applications in data-rich areas of molecular biology.

We are soliciting proposals for three hour workshops appropriate to the diverse PSB conference community. Workshops can include: panels of experts on emerging areas of computational biology that are not likely to attract the number of paper submissions required for a session; open discussions of topics important to the computational biology community; or other topics and formats. Workshops at previous PSB meetings have included:

• AI Ethics and Values in Biomedicine – Technical Challenges and Solutions
• Navigating ethical quandaries with the privacy dilemma of biomedical datasets
• Training the Next Generation of Quantitative Biologists
• Command Line to PipeLine: Cross-Biobank Analyses with Nextflow
• Diversity and Disparity in Biomedical Informatics
• Integrating Community-level Data Resources for Precision Medicine Research
• All Together Now: Data Work to Advance Privacy, Science, and Health in the Age of Synthetic Data
• Opportunities and Pitfalls with Large Language Models for Biomedical Annotation

Responsibilities of a workshop chair:

As a proposer of an accepted workshop, you will become the workshop chair. The chair's primary responsibility is to organize and preside over the presentations related to your workshop.

Procedure for submitting proposals:

Proposals can be as short as a single page and should in no case be more than 6 pages. The proposal should:

• Define a specific technical area to be covered, and a format for the workshop.
• Justify why the proposed area is appropriate for PSB. Discuss why the topic is timely and important, and how the topic has been addressed in other conferences or recent publications. Describe why the proposed format is appropriate for the workshop.
• If the workshop proposes invited experts, provide evidence that the experts will attend the workshop. Participants are required to register for the conference.
• Provide a short autobiographical sketch and an explicit statement that your organization endorses your involvement.

Proposals must be submitted online at https://psb.wufoo.com/forms/psb-workshop-proposal-submission-form/.

Important Dates

Tues, February 18, 2025

Proposals Due

Mon, March 17, 2025

Notification Regarding the Proposals

Each proposal will be evaluated by the organizing committee. We look forward to your submissions.

Questions? Please send email to

Lawrence Hunter
Professor of Pediatrics
University of Chicago
E-mail: lehunter at uchicago dot edu