Systems Approaches in Immunology and Infectious Diseases

We are happy to announce the fourth biennial conference on “Systems Approaches in Immunology and Infectious Diseases,” to be held in Santa Fe, NM on September, 27-28, 2016. Our understanding of the immune system is rapidly being transformed by the development of new experimental techniques, including single-cell analysis, in vivo imaging and high-throughput repertoire sequencing. Many of these approaches generate vast amounts of data, and an increasing number of studies seek to apply the methods of mathematical modeling to analyze and integrate these data. The goal of such systems approaches is a global and quantitative understanding of the immune response. However, much of the experimental and theoretical work carried out to-date has focused on questions relating to only one spatiotemporal scale, for example, on understanding signal processing within single cells or population dynamics of T cell responses to viral infections. Further understanding will be advanced by the development of theoretical and experimental techniques and models that bring together phenomena at different levels of complexity to study mechanisms arising at the systems level.

As with the previous international workshops on “Systems Approaches in Immunology,” this meeting will provide a multi-disciplinary forum to discuss the latest developments at the boundary of experimental and computational immunology. It is organized under the premise that understanding of immunology and infectious diseases will be advanced by the development of theoretical and experimental techniques and models that bring together phenomena at different levels of complexity. Research themes will be focused on systems-level analysis of immunological processes that span the molecular, cellular, population, and organismal levels, both experimentally and theoretically. Along with sharing new approaches and insights, we hope to generate new collaborative research, and the schedule will be designed to allow plenty of time for interactions beyond the talks and poster sessions.