Mission

The mission of the PanAmerican Bioinformatics Institute (PABI) is to facilitate public health and economic development in the Americas through education, research and outreach activities in bioinformatics and genomics.

Creation of PABI

PABI was formed by Leonardo Mariño-Ramírez and King Jordan.  Building on their collaborative work in Colombia, Leo and King formed the institute to further advance training and research efforts in bioinformatics and genomics in Latin America.  While these efforts have been seeded through, and are currently focused on, collaborations between research institutions in Colombia and the USA, it is anticipated that this model will soon be extended across the Americas.

PABI is about People

PABI is a virtual institute made up of a Panamerican network of researchers in bioinformatics and genomics.  Members of PABI are committed to training the next generation of investigators in the latest tools, techniques and approaches to bioinformatics and genomics.  The goal of this training is to create a sustainable base of local capacity that can address region-specific public health and economic challenges.

Bioinformatics and Genomics

The research areas of bioinformatics and genomics lend themselves to bilateral collaborations with developing countries.  The biological sciences are undergoing a revolution in experimental technology that is resulting in massive data sets of unprecedented breadth and depth, particularly in the field of genomics.  As such, the bottleneck in genomics research occurs more often than ever at the level of bioinformatic analysis of these large-scale data sets.  Fortunately, bioinformatics research can be relatively inexpensive, and substantial contributions can be made using only a desktop computer and an internet connection.  The limiting factors for this kind of work are the enthusiasm, skills and imagination of the bioinformatics researchers addressing the questions in health and biology. These human characteristics can be found in abundant supply among the people of Latin America, and PABI activities are designed to transform this human potential into a set of tangible skills and abilities.