The keynote lecture for Shared Horizons will be provided by David B. Searls:

“With a Wild Surmise: Intimations of Computational Biology in Keats, Carroll, and Joyce” posits that key elements of the literary genres of Romanticism, Victorian nonsense literature, and Modernism prefigured both challenges and methodologies of twenty-first-century computational biology. Drawing on examples from John Keats for systems biology, Lewis Carroll for sequence analysis, and James Joyce for text mining, this keynote will offer insights into the cross-analytical possibilities of literary criticism and bioinformatics.

David B. Searls was until recently a Senior Vice President at GlaxoSmithKline, where he led the bioinformatics group for 13 years. He is now an independent consultant and serves on a number of scientific advisory boards. He holds an adjunct appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where he was formerly Research Associate Professor of Genetics. He received undergraduate degrees in Life Sciences and Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, a Ph.D. in biology from the Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA, and an MSE in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include systems biology, macromolecular linguistics and data integration. For more information including a list of recent publications, please visit his academic homepage.

View a Powerpoint Slideshow of the presentation.