About ISCB

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) serves over 3,000 members from more than 70 countries by addressing scientific policies, providing access to high quality publications, organizing meetings, and serving as a portal to information about training, education, employment and news from related fields.  The ISCB hosts annual meetings, including the ISMB, the world's longest running and largest bioinformatics conference (held jointly with the ECCB every other year in Europe). The ISCB also affiliates with several other significant meetings of our science, has two official journals of the highest impact factors in the Mathematical & Computational Biology category, and has affiliations in place with several other publications for the benefit of our members.

The ISCB is incorporated in the United States as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, and registered in the state of California as a Charitable Trust. Now hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California, San Diego, the Society was officially formed in 1997 as an outgrowth of the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB). From humble beginnings, both the ISCB's membership and the ISMB's annual attendance have kept pace with the overall growth experienced in the field of bioinformatics/computational biology.

For the complete story from conception to present day please visit the History link. Additional links provide copies of documents that detail the legal structure of the ISCB, which may prove interesting to our current and prospective members, as well as be of some use to regional groups around the world wanting to form national or regional societies and not knowing how to begin. And finally, activities over the years are documented in the Newsletter Archives. We encourage you to peruse all of these links for a perspective on where we've been and where you might help lead us in the years ahead.