Posted on: Monday, January 10, 2005

Conference to open new Kaka'ako campus

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

A two-day Hawai'i Bioscience Conference on Thursday and Friday at the Hawai'i Convention Center will officially open the new Kaka'ako campus of the John A. Burns School of Medicine.

Topics include infectious disease, systems biology, genomics — preventing disease through DNA analysis — and bioinformatics.

Nobel Prize winners David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology, and J. Michael Bishop, chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, will keynote. Also keynoting will be Leroy Hood, president of Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle and Irving L. Weissman, director of the Institute for Cancer and Stem Cell Biology and Medicine at Stanford University.

The conference includes a gala reception and tour from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday at the new school.

Plans call for some administrators and faculty to begin moving in March into offices in the Education Building, the first of two buildings to be completed on the Kaka'ako campus. All medical school classes are set to begin there April 4. Additionally, the cafe will open that date to students and the public, and will be staffed by students from the Culinary Arts program at Kapi'olani Community College.

The school's second building, with research laboratories, is expected to be complete over the summer, with move-in scheduled in early August and the opening on Aug. 17.