STAFF REPORT IBD: The ISCB-RSG-Pakistan in collaboration with Pakistan Medical Students’ Research Society (PMSRS) has recently hosted a three-day intensive short distance learning course for medical students.
This course provided an introduction to medical informatics, sequence analysis, phylogenetics, molecular modeling, protein-protein interaction, pathways studies, drug designing and data mining of medical data etc. The objectives of the course were to present the state-of-the-art developments in medical informatics and bioinformatics to increase the knowledge of participants in the application of recent information technology tools in medicine; to enable participants to develop and strengthen collaborative studies.
According to an official of the organization committee, the course was targeted for a wide-range of health-related professions and students. The criteria for selection included the participant’s affiliation with an academic institution, experience with bioinformatics tools and availability to attend the full course.
Participants described the course as a positive experience, which supports the hypothesis that these types of courses can be very effective vehicles for translating and transferring the current informatics knowledge to health professionals.