IBEST - Initiative for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies

The Initiative for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST) is an interdisciplinary group of faculty, students and friends from several disciplines which investigates evolutionary phenomena and the bioinformatics tools to explain them. Our research is focused on:

Evolutionary Studies examine the process of evolution, both in living organisms and in simulations. It seeks to understand the mechanisms of natural evolution, and to discover means for using simulations of evolution in artificial systems such as genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation. The methods for evolutionary studies include molecular biology, population genetics, mathematical and statistical analyses, and computer simulations.

Bioinformatics is an emerging discipline that unites computational and biological sciences to translate biological data into new knowledge. This is achieved by the systematic development of information technologies, data representation, and inferencing techniques and their application to empirical biological data.

Our core membership includes faculty and students from biological, mathematical and computational sciences and spans several departments and colleges at the University of Idaho. We also have affiliates and interested colleagues from several other departments and colleges at the UI as well as other universities world-wide.

Our membership is open to anyone interested in our research which includes exploring aspects of evolution in both natural and artificial systems, and developing and testing algorithms and techniques for analyzing data from molecular biology. If you are interested in participating in IBEST visit our weekly discussion group. Download a copy of the summer 2005 calendar (pdf 40K), or contact James A. Foster, foster@cs.uidaho.edu, IBEST Director.

The Initiative for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST) at the University of Idaho is also the umbrella organization that coordinates the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) graduate degree program with an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students.