As the Beckman Institute celebrates 20 years of leading the way in doing interdisciplinary research, one of its key groups is marking a similar milestone. Twenty years ago, the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group (TCB) was funded as a National Institutes of Health Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics.

Led by Professor Klaus Schulten, TCB has been the gold standard when it comes to doing computational modeling of biology, providing cutting-edge visualizations of molecular scale biological structures and processes since 1989. TCB has developed and refined software programs such as VMD and NAMD that have over the years allowed researchers worldwide to perform molecular dynamics simulations with ever-greater detail and accuracy.

To celebrate their two decades of success and look ahead to the future, TCB will be playing host to a 20th anniversary symposium titled “Computational Biology of the Cell - The Next Decade.” The symposium, set for Sept. 21-23 at the Beckman Institute, will feature some of the most prominent scientists in the field.

The TCB group describes this symposium as an opportunity for people to discuss, and take advantage of, advancements such as petascale computing and new algorithms for even greater breakthroughs in computational modeling in the future.

The introduction to the symposium states: “We need to prepare ourselves for the challenges and opportunities of the next decade. This one-of-a-kind symposium ‘Computational Biology - The Next Decade’ will give us the freedom to explore what’s ahead.”

More than 20 speakers are slated to talk at the three-day symposium.