Session introduction

2014 marks the 19th Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The past year has been a magnificent one for computational biology. Dr. Michael Levitt won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October 2013 for his work modeling and simulating biological macromolecular structure. The demand for bioinformatics and computational biology skills in the marketplace has exploded, and there is a robust industry emerging providing “Big Data” services in support of genomics, pharmaceuticals and health care. The NIH has announced a $100M program in “Big Data to Knowledge” or BD2K, to support a broad portfolio of work across all biomedical disciplines.