Louisiana Tech University Hazel Stewart Garner Associate Professor of Chemistry, Nanosystems Engineering and Physics Dr. Tom Connor Bishop is now co-founder and co-chair of a Multiscale Genome Organization Subgroup of the Biophysical Society. The Biophysical Society is an international scientific society with over 7,500 members in academia, government, and industry.

The Multiscale Genome Organization Subgroup will host an annual meeting and provide a means of coordinating activities that bring biologists, chemists, physicists and mathematicians together to advance our understanding of genomes on temporal and spatial scales from individual nucleic acids to whole organisms. The supported work will use a broad range of experimental, theoretical and computational techniques to decipher how genomic and epigenomic information drives basic life processes.

Bishop will share duties with co-chair Prof. Tamar Schlick, professor of chemistry, computer science and mathematics at New York University. Development of this subgroup and a special issue of The Biophysical Journal in May 2020 devoted to the topic were two outcomes of an April 2019 Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting in France.

Bishop and Schlick, along with Lars Nordenskiöld, chair of the School of Biological Sciences and professor of biological sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Andrzej Stasiak, associate professor of biology and medicine at the University of Lausanne organized the April 2019 meeting. Bishop’s participation was partially funded by Louisiana Tech’s College of Engineering and Science Research and Development strategic travel funds.

“Establishing this subgroup was a community effort,” Bishop said. “It signals a widely shared desire to further develop our understanding of the genetic processes at work in all biologic organisms. The MGO subgroup gives our community an identity and an avenue for growth. I am very pleased to attach Louisiana Tech University’s name to this effort.”   

The official announcement from the Biophysical Society can be found at https://www.biophysics.org/blog/bps-announces-new-multiscale-genome-organization-subgroup-1. The May 2020 special issue of the Biophysical Journal can be found at https://www.cell.com/biophysj/issue?pii=S0006-3495(19)X0010-7.