Department Initiatives and Events
Fall 2025
Visualizing, Controlling, and Quantifying Cellular Signaling - Workshop 2025
By the UTSW-UNC Center for Cell Signaling Analysis.
After last year’s inaugural workshop for disseminating our tools and pipelines to trainers of microscopy cores, we are excited to announce our second workshop designed for advanced researchers—such as PhD students and postdocs—who are interested in integrating light-sheet microscopy, molecular imaging tools (biosensors, opto/ chemogenetics), and time-series analysis to quantitatively elucidate the intracellular signaling events that shape cell biological outcomes.
Check out our Event Page for details and to apply or scan the QR in our flyer below!
The mainstream initiatives and events within the department are listed below:
- BioHPC
The department established high-performance computing infrastructure and services for powering clinical and basic science research at UT Southwestern with computational storage, tools, and softwares. We also offer a competitive BioHPC Fellowship to current PhD students and PostDocs who are BioHPC users and would like to apply computer science to their biomedical projects.
- The Discovery Engine Program
Any non-faculty individual within the department or Computational Biology BME program may submit an idea for receiving funding. The goal is to offer a protected space to implement ideas. - Nanocourses
Department faculty teach 1-2 day interactive courses on various bioinformatics softwares, tools, and analytics. All UTSW personnel are welcome to apply. - U-HackMed
This initiative launched in 2018 with a hackathon that was a huge success, followed by a 2019 hackathon and a 2020 gap year. After a hiatus due to the pandemic, the department launched NeuroChats that brought together computational neuroscientists across the globe for discussing cutting edge papers with the first authors (graduate students and postdocs). This series ran from June 2022 through March 2023. - Center for Metastatic Tumor Imaging
Three department faculty in collaboration with scientists and clinicians from Harvard, CHLA, and CRI-UTSW established this Center from a CCBIR grant. - UTSW-UNC Center for Cell Signaling Analysis
Two department faculty in collaboration with UNC faculty established this Center from an RM1 grant. As a major part of this grant involves dissemination of cutting edge technology, the Center hosted a Train the Trainers workshop from 9/23 to 10/5/2024. Fourteen leaders of world-class Microscopy Centers from around the nation were invited to learn about modular microscope design, sample processing-imaging, and customizable software pipelines. - The Biomedical Engineering Program - Computational Biology
This graduate program trains young scientists to leverage transdisciplinary expertise for creative solutions to biomedical research problems.
Past Events
The department of bioinformatics held a retreat at the Perot Museum of Nature & Science on October 22, 2024. The day began with an intense Research pictionary competition followed by poster sessions, a panel discussion on diverse career paths by department alumni, celebration & farewell of our former DA, and vision for our 10th anniversary next year by our Chair.
Three interdisciplinary teams from UT Southwestern brainstormed innovative healthcare projects using AI in Summer 2024. Read the story here.
Big Data for Breast Cancer Hackathon Challenge 2023
Participants from across the globe came together to work on pressing research questions on Breast Cancer in this collaborative hackathon held March 3-5, 2023 at UT Southwestern in collaboration with Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and Susan G. Komen.
2022 Bioinformatics and Computational Biology retreat
Held at the Dallas Arboretum on October 28, 2022, this was an all-day event with scientific talks, poster session, and fun activities. Undergraduates from across the nation applied for a competitive all-expenses paid trip to Dallas for a weekend to present their own research projects and mingle with our faculty, students, and research staff.