A team of 11 CoSBi researchers integrated with 3 French researchers and 1 German researcher won first prize in the first international formal biological modeling competition that concluded today, 27 February 2009, in Dagstuhl, Germany and in which over 100 researchers from all over the world participated.
The team was composed of Attila Csikász-Nagy (the team leader), Alessandro Romanel (the team’s representative at the competition), Ferenc Jordán, Roberto Larcher, Paola Lecca, Alida Palmisano, Sean Sedwards, Judit Zámborszky, Paolo Ballarini, Tommaso Mazza and Ivan Mura of CoSBi, Sylvain Soliman from INRIA - Le Chesnay (France), Denis Thieffry from the Université de la Méditerrannée - Marseille (France), Adrien Fauré from TAGC (France) and Heike Siebert from FU Berlin (Germany).
This prestigious award recognizes the research done at CoSBi, which has always concentrated on quality, not quantity. CoSBi has consolidated its position at an international level as a point of reference for the new discipline of algorithmic systems biology, which has been developing rapidly in the last few years.
The goal of the competition was to evaluate the prospects of the various techniques of both the modeling and analysis of biological systems that have been recently developed by the major international research groups in this sector. The platform “CoSBi Lab”, developed at CoSBi and based on the new programming language BlenX, proved to be the strongest project of the competition and led the team to win first place.