The Overton Prize was established by the ISCB in memory of G. Christian Overton, a major contributor to the field of bioinformatics and member of the ISCB Board of Directors who died unexpectedly in 2000. The prize is awarded for outstanding accomplishment to a scientist in the early- to mid-stage of his or her career who has already made a significant contribution to the field of computational biology through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.

Picture: 2007 Overton Prize Winner, Dr. Eran Segal

The International Society for Computational Biology is pleased to award the 2007 Overton Prize to Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

ISCB established the Overton Prize in 2001 in memory of G. Christian Overton, who was director
of the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Pennsylvania and a major contributor to the field. The award acknowledges community members who are less than 12 years post-degree and have already made major contributions to the field through research, education, service, or a combination of the three. “He [Overton] was a member of the ISCB Board of Directors, and his sudden death in 2000 was a shock to the community,” said Thomas Lengauer, chair of the ISCB Awards Committee. “Those of us who remember Chris Overton remember the kind of work he did—however laborious it was, it was always exciting and thought provoking, dominated by an innovative spark. Eran Segal seems to me to be especially deserving of this award in Chris's memory."

In the summer of 2006, Eran Segal and colleagues published a study in Nature (442, 772-778, 17 August 2006) hypothesizing that the instructions for wrapping DNA around nucleosomes are contained in the DNA itself, using a statistical computational model to predict exactly how that is done, and completing the proof by verifying the predictions with experiments in yeast.

"This important paper brought Segal and his main collaborator, experimentalist Jonathan Widom of Northwestern University, a lot of attention," says Lengauer. "It was featured in Nature's 'News and Views' section in an article by Tim Richmond, and the work was also described in a 'Making the Paper' section. And it made The New York Times on July 25, 2006.

Segal obtained his B.Sc. (summa cum laude) in computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 1998. He did his doctoral work in computer science and genetics at Stanford University, obtaining his Ph.D. in 2004. His advisor, Daphne Koller, remembers him vividly. "One of Eran's most impressive qualities," she says, "is his ability to get things done effectively and extremely well. He would be working on five projects, and I would be sure that at most one would get done. But not with Eran—he just kept producing idea after idea, result after result, paper after paper.”

Segal spent a year as a research fellow at the Center for Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University before joining the Weizmann Institute in 2005. "My lab develops quantitative statistical models aimed at understanding how molecular components interact in performing complex biological functions," Segal says. "We are interested in the control of transcription and translation and the structure of chromatin as it contributes to these. We are currently applying our ideas to the transcriptional network of the Drosophila embryo, in an attempt to develop thermodynamic models that will explain how cells compute the expression patterns of the system from the cis-regulatory DNA sequence and binding-site preferences of the participating transcription factors. We're also continuing our work on the DNA sequence preferences of nucleosomes and the way in which they specify the overall nucleosome organization."

Of his award, Segal says, "I'm very honored to be singled out, and I must thank my mentors, Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, and my students, colleagues, and collaborators, people without whose efforts no progress could be made. In particular, I am enjoying close collaborations with several experimentalists like Jon Widom, Ulrike Gaul, and Howard Chang, and I'm extremely appreciative of their ability to confirm or refute in vivo the results that emerge from our lab's efforts in silico. We, in turn, take cues from their results in revising or adjusting our models. This prize affirms the value of our process."

Eran Segal will be presented with the 2007 ISCB Overton Prize in Vienna and give a keynote address on July 23, 2007. To read additional biographical information and view an abstract of his talk, “Quantitative Models for Chromatin and Transcription Regulation,” see www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2007/ keynotespresentations/#segal.

Picture: 2006 Overton Prize Winner, Dr. Mathieu Blanchette

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) awards the 2006 Overton Prize to Mathieu Blanchette, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montréal. The prize is awarded at the ISCB annual meeting, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, held in Fortaleza, Brazil, on August 8, 2006 when Blanchette delivers the annual Overton keynote lecture entitled "What mammalian genomes tell us about our ancestors, and vice versa."

"Mathieu Blanchette is responsible for fundamental, highly cited contributions in several areas of bioinformatics," says Professor Thomas Lengauer of the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, who is chair of the ISCB Awards Committee.

"His doctoral thesis contained perhaps the first reasonable algorithm for gene-order phylogeny, based on a solution to the breakpoint median problem, and it also elaborated the now-famous concept of phylogenetic footprinting. As a postdoctoral researcher, he played a central role in working out algorithms for reconstructing ancestral mammalian genomes. His most recent work continues his interest in the inference of evolutionary scenarios and gene regulation. And he has been active in the bioinformatics community since his student days, presenting papers at the Computing and Combinatorics conferences and the Research in Computational Molecular Biology meetings, among others. He is currently organizing several workshops and conferences, has attracted many students to his new lab, and has been highly successful in obtaining funding in a competitive environment."

From 1994 through 1997, Blanchette was an undergraduate in the Mathematics and Computer Science departments of the Université de Montréal. After graduating, he did an M.Sc. there as well, writing a thesis on breakpoint phylogeny under the direction of David Sankoff. He then went to the University of Washington, obtaining a Ph.D. in Computer Science (2002) under the supervision of Martin Tompa. He spent the next year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering of the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he worked with David Haussler. He took up his current position at McGill in 2003.

Blanchette says, "Chris Overton was one of the first explorers of the world of bioinformatics, before the name even existed, and he opened the area to young people like me. I am immensely grateful for the work he did and greatly honored to receive this award, created in his memory after his untimely death in 2000." The award is given annually to a scientist in the early to middle stage of his or her career who has contributed significantly to computational biology through research, education, service, or a combination of the three.

For an abstract of Blanchette's keynote address, please see
ismb2006.cbi.cnptia.embrapa.br/keynotes.html#blanchette.

Picture: 2005 Overton Prize Winner, Ewan Birney

2005 Overton Prize Winner - Ewan Birney

Dr. Ewan Birney of the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), was awarded the 2005 Overton Prize in honor of his advocacy of open source bioinformatics, and his generous contributions to the BioPerl community. Perhaps even more important to biology is his leadership of the Ensembl genome annotation project, providing rapid and accurate computational annotations for eukaryotic genomes.

“Dr. Birney follows his own advice, and credits the success of the Ensembl project to the open source development model," said Dr. Lawrence Hunter of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, the ISCB's founder and former chair of the ISCB Awards Committee. Hunter added, "Dr. Birney is not only a hugely productive scientist, but he started young: his first bioinformatics tools, Pairwise and Searchwise, were published when he was an undergraduate at Oxford, and their successor, GeneWise, is still in broad use more than a decade after its introduction."

The prize was awarded at the ISCB's annual meeting, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), in Detroit, Michigan, on June 29, where Dr. Birney then delivered the annual Overton keynote lecture on the final day of the conference.

For additional information on Dr. Birney’s many contributions to bioinformatics, please read the ISCB newsletter article at http://www.iscb.org/newsletter8-2/birney.html.

Picture: 2004 Overton Prize Winner, Uri Alon

2004 Overton Prize Winner - Uri Alon

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) awarded the 2004 Overton Prize to Uri Alon, senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The prize was awarded at the ISCB's annual meeting, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB), in Glasgow, Scotland, on August 4, 2004. Alon delivered the annual Overton keynote lecture, entitled "Design principles of biological networks."

"Uri Alon epitomizes the spirit of the Overton Prize. Despite being in a relatively early stage of his career, he has made significant contributions to computational biology, particularly in the areas of network motifs and the design principles of biological networks," said Larry Hunter of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, chair of the ISCB Awards Committee.

Alon received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Weizmann Institute, where he studied statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics. During Alon's graduate studies he became intrigued by the biological sciences after reading a biology textbook. Subsequently, he headed for his postdoctoral studies at Princeton determined to learn experimental biology.

For more information on Alon please see the ISCB newsletter article announcing his selection for this award at http://www.iscb.org/newsletter7-3/overton.html

Picture: 2003 Overton Prize Winner, Jim Kent

2003 Overton Prize Winner - Jim Kent

The ISCB will award the Overton Prize for 2003 to W. James Kent, an assistant research scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of computational biology, will be presented at ISMB2003, where Kent will deliver the annual Overton Lecture on July 1, 2003.

Kent is best known as the researcher who "saved" the human genome project, a feat chronicled in the New York Times. With little more than a month before the company Celera was to present a complete draft of the human genome to the White House in 2000, Kent wrote GigAssembler, a program that produced the first full working draft assembly of the human genome, which kept the data freely available in the public domain.

Kent's main scientific goal has been to understand gene regulation by building bioinformatics tools such as his Intronerator system for exploring the genome of C. elegans; the program WABA, one of the first pair-HMMs for alignment of genomic DNA of two species; Improbiser, an expectation-maximization method to discover and cluster potential transcription factor binding sites; and the popular BLAT, which rapidly searches full genomes at both the DNA and protein levels.

Picture: 2002 Overton Prize Winner, David Baker (photo credit: University of Washington/Mary Levin)

2002 Overton Prize Winner - David Baker

The winner of this year’s Overton Prize, David Baker, associate professor at the University of Washington and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, delivered the Overton Lecture on the last day of ISMB2002. In the keynote talk, titled "Predication and design of protein structures and protein-protein interactions," Baker thanked the ISCB, "for this great honor." He then reviewed his research as well as explaining the contributions of his colleagues. Baker said, "It’s an exciting time because we can create new molecules that do all kinds of interesting things."

Larry Hunter, the founder of the ISCB and current Board member, introduced Baker. "David’s contributions to the field are many and excellent," he said. Hunter mentioned the CASP4 competition and said, "Thanks on behalf of the bioinformatics community for unraveling one of our most interesting problems."

The ISCB Awards Committee unanimously selected Baker to receive the Overton Prize for his work in applying computational science to drug design, genetics, and health care, and, in particular, the Rosetta algorithm, which predicts protein structure.

Picture: 2001 Overton Prize Winner, Christopher B. Burge

2001 Overton Prize Winner - Christopher B. Burge

The ISCB Awards Committee unanimously selected Christopher B. Burge, of the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the inaugural recipient of the Overton Prize for his work on identifying and modeling genes in higher eukaryotic organisms. The theory and tools that he developed have advanced our understanding of the human genome and aided scientists throughout the biomedical sciences in their work.

Chris was selected in recognition of his path breaking research on gene modeling and development of algorithms for gene identification. His work has had an enormous impact on genome annotation,” stated David States, Director of Bioinformatics of the University of Michigan, and Chair of the ISCB Awards Committee.

In recognition of his being awarded this prize, Burge gave a keynote lecture at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, held July 21-25, 2001 in Tivoli Gardens - one of the world's oldest amusement parks, situated in the very heart of the city.

For an abstract of Burge’s lecture please see http://ismb01.cbs.dtu.dk/talks/session4.html#session47

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