Healthy China, Healthy World

CEAS Faculty Launch Global Conference on Computational Medicine and Big Data

Dean Fotis Sotiropoulos, with an interdisciplinary team from the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, represented Stony Brook University at the first Cheeloo Conference on Computational Medicine and Big Data in Jinan, China, an exciting global US-China research partnership betweenStony Brook University and other partners, and the Jinan Supercomputer Center.

An International Conference on Computational Medicine and Big Data, organized by Professor Yuefan Deng in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, together with colleagues from across the College, was designed to identify critical problems and propose leading solution methods and time-wise milestones, leveraging the most advanced supercomputer methods to biomedical research, healthcare, and massive analysis on intensive data. The conference attracted more than 300 attendees and two dozen distinguished speakers from Harvard, MIT, Brown, IBM, Tsinghua, Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Supercomputer Centers, Univ. Auckland, and more.

Dean Sotiropoulos opened the conference addressing the rapid advances in multi-scale and multi-physics computational algorithms— bridging the scales from cells to organs to organisms and enabling in silico models of the human body.  This, combined with exponential growth in computing power, big data, machine learning and in medical imaging, are converging to create a “perfect storm” to transform medical research, health care delivery and personalized medicine.   

Over the past five years the collaboration between Stony Brook University and the National Supercomputer Center in Jinan has been expanding from individual visits, to joint projects, to sharing the best resources including supercomputing power and advanced algorithms, to exchanges of students and junior faculty members.

Professor Danny Bluestein in the Department of Biomedical Engineering presented the latest results of this collaboration on multiscale modeling of platelet activation and aggregation, which he, Professor Deng and their students have conducted using the Jinan Shenwei Supercomputers.