The aim of this summer school is to introduce PhD students to cutting edge research in bioinformatics, systems and synthetic biology, applied to plant biology.

The summer school is explicitly interdisciplinary. Computational biology, bioinformatics and systems biology lie at the interface of a number of disciplines, yet traditional discipline-led teaching rarely provides opportunities to explore this interface. This summer school aims to address that issue, and plant science provides the ideal biological arena in which to do this.

This summer school will also serve as a forum for the interchange of ideas, transfer of research expertise and good practice. We anticipate it will also result in the identification of new challenges in multidisciplinary computational and mathematical research as applied to plant biology.

Ultimately, we aim to help the next generation of research leaders (currently undergoing doctoral training) to focus on developing their own interdisciplinary research applied to biological problems.