UMD to Hosts International Conference on Bioinformatics Research

The University of Maryland will host an international conference this week that explores the latest in computational tools and methods used for research involving genomics and systems biology.

The 25th annual Wonderful Algorithms for Bioinformatics conference (WABI 2025) joins 65 researchers from around the world for a series of talks and networking events focused on discrete algorithms and machine learning tools that can address important challenges in molecular biology.

Held every other year in the United States, this year’s conference will take place in the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering from August 20–22.

Mihai Pop, a UMD professor of computer science and the local chair for the conference, says that as the volume of biological data continues to expand due to modern sequencing technologies, discovering newfound methods of collecting, processing and analyzing that data have become imperative. 

He notes that current bioinformatics research may easily involve petabytes of data (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes), with other computing challenges arising in the form of capturing genomic diversity within human populations, as no existing solution effectively handles both vast amounts of data and genomic variation.

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