Society Announcements

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GIW XXXI ISCB-Asia V Opens Call for Papers

GIW ISCB-Asia has a rich history as a conference to present and discuss research in computational biology and computational aspects of genomics. Both theoretical and application oriented research is welcome.

This call is for original research. Submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed for oral presentation at the conference. Any co-author (registered for the conference) can present an accepted submission. A person may be co-author of multiple submissions, but can only present one of them.

We will also recommend those manuscripts for publication in one of the journals listed below. Which journal depends on the nature and strength of the manuscript. Authors are encouraged to let us know their preferences and may opt-out if unhappy with our recommendation. Publication charges vary by journal and are the responsibility of the authors.

Based on past experience, we expect that most research presented at the conference will be published within a few months of the conference. But please be aware that journals reserve the right to do further review or even reject recommended manuscripts.

Journals which have agreed to work with us include:

Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics Advances
Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
BMC Bioinformatics
GigaScience
GigaByte

Bioinformatics and GigaScience are highly competitive so at most only a few manuscripts will be published in those journals. The Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and BMC Bioinformatics, are well established journals which have published many articles from GIW and ISCB-Asia in the past. Bioinformatics Advances and GigaByte are new journals with strong organizational support. We believe they have a bright future.

Submission site: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=giwiscbasia2022

Submission deadline: August 17, 2022

GIW XXXI/ISCB-Asia V will be held (in-person or virtually) in Tainan, Taiwan from Dec. 12 to 14, 2022.

Learn More / Submit A Paper

ISCB Congratulates the 2022 Class of Fellows

The ISCB Fellows program was created to honor members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. Begun in 2009, 2022 marks the 13th anniversary of the program. Each December, ISCB seeks Fellows’ nominations from our members who meet the eligibility criteria for significant scientific and leadership contributions to the field of computational biology and bioinformatics.

This year we received many outstanding nominations, each considered carefully by the Fellows Selection Committee members. We are pleased to announce the eleven nominees elected to be this year's Fellows.

Barbara Bryant, Senior Director of Bioinformatics, Constellation Pharmaceuticals

For her foundational efforts in shaping ISCB, specifically crafting the early advocacy efforts of ISCB.

Sean Eddy, Professor, Harvard University; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

As a founder of modern biological sequence analysis, elected for his fundamental algorithmic contributions, but also for contributing to broader conversations about genomics and the role of "big science" in biology and medicine.

Fran Lewitter, Founding Director, Retired, Bioinformatics and Research Computing Department, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

For her tireless advocation for bioinformatics education and training on behalf of ISCB and the field of bioinformatics and computational biology.

Mikhail Gelfand, Professor Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology; Laboratory Head at Institute for Information Transmission Problems

A pioneer of comparative genomics, elected specifically for his work on gene recognition in eukaryotic genomes that led to the first spliced alignment algorithm for gene finding and to the prediction of an unexpectedly high frequency of the alternative splicing in human genes.

Takashi Gojobori, Distinguished Professor of Bioscience, Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

For his development of key methods in molecular evolution, coining the term "nonsynonymous substitution" and co-developing the Nei-Gojobori method for estimating the ratio of the number of nonsynonymous substitutions per non-synonymous site.

Trey Ideker, Professor, Departments of Medicine, Bioengineering, and Computer Science, University of California, San Diego

Recognized for his pioneering work in network biology, specifically applications of network methods to study phenotypes in model organisms and human diseases including cancer, as well as the development of the widely used Cytoscape software for network analysis and visualization.

David Jones, Professor of Bioinformatics, University College London; Director, Bloomsbury Centre for Bioinformatics

A pre-eminent researcher in protein sequence and structure prediction, most notable for his major contributions in protein structure prediction (THREADER & PSIPRED), automatic rapid derivation of new Dayhoff matrices (PET91), covariation analysis of sequence data (PSICOV); the classification of protein folds (CATH) and tools to predict disordered regions and membrane proteins (DISOPRED & MEMSAT).

Jun Liu, Professor of Statistics, Harvard University

As an influential leader in Bayesian statistical modeling and computation
with seminal contributions in the theory and method of Markov Chain Monte Carlo and sequential Monte Carlo, which have been created and applied to scientific problems such as motif discovery and cancer genomics, and for his development of widely used tools in bioinformatics and data science.

Debora S. Marks, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine

Recognized for her state-of-the-art approaches exploiting deep learning to predict pathogenicity of human genetic variation, her use of AI technologies and mathematical approaches for biotherapeutic design, and her development of statistical methods that combine theory and computation to extract information from genomic datasets, with recent focus on novel Bayesian deep generative modelling strategies for a wide range of biological applications.

Mihai Pop, Professor, Department of Computer Science Director, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Maryland, College Park

A leader in the development of algorithms for analyzing metagenomic data, particularly in the context of metagenome assembly and identification of structural variants in assembly graphs, and for his important contributions to large community projects.

Reinhard Schneider, Head of Bioinformatics Core Facility, Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB); Professor, University of Luxembourg

Recognized for his significant foundational contributions to both ISCB and the broader bioinformatics communities, specifically the establishment of the ISCB Student Council, the introduction of the ISCB web portal, and the formation of multi-year ISCB membership options.

ISCB will be honoring the 2022 Class of Fellows during the back to in-person ISMB 2022 hybrid conference.

Congratulations, 2022 Class of ISCB Fellows!

ISCB Confers ISCB Fellows Distinction to Mikhail Gelfand

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) bestows one of its highest scientific honors, ISCB Fellow, to Mikhail Gelfand, Ph.D., for his pioneering contributions to bioinformatics research on an international scale, most recently in the area of comparative genomics.

Bioinformatics and computational biology involve computational analyses of large complex biological data sets e.g. genomes. These analyses play a crucial role in modern-day biology and medicine.

Dr. Gelfand is a Professor at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia and Laboratory Head at Institute for Information Transmission Problems, Moscow, Russia.  His research specializes in comparative genomics, systems biology, molecular evolution, transcriptomics, and metagenomics.  Dr. Gelfand is a leading pioneer in bioinformatics and computational biology.  His work on gene recognition in eukaryotic genomes, integrating the nucleotide frequency statistics of splicing site and coding/non-coding regions (Gelfand, NAR 1990), led to the first spliced alignment algorithm for gene prediction (Gelfand et al., PNAS 1996) and to predicting an unexpectedly high frequency of the alternative splicing in human genes (Mironov et al., Genome Res. 1999). Gelfand was the first to predict the existence of riboswitches, regulatory RNA structures that change conformation after binding by small molecules (Gelfand et al., Trends Genet. 1999). He also demonstrated that a bacterial ribosome may act as a zinc depot (Panina et al., PNAS 2003) and how TFs find their binding sites in the cell (Kolesov et al, PNAS 2007). Recently, he worked on analysis of genome rearrangements (Moldovan & Gelfand, Front. Microbiol. 2019) and showed that younger pathogens have an increased level of genome rearrangements (Bochkareva et al., PeerJ 2018).

Dr. Gelfand’s impact on the field goes beyond research.  He has made fundamental contributions to bioinformatics education in Russia. In 2002, he co-founded the Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Department at the Moscow State University (MSU) – arguably, the first bioinformatics department in the world. As a professor at MSU, he trained a group of Russian bioinformaticians who are now leading bioinformatics research in Russia and beyond. In 2003, Gelfand founded the biennial International Moscow Conference of Computational Molecular Biology, the main bioinformatics conference in Russia which he has been continuously chairing since its inception. Also, each year, he teaches high school students at the Summer School of Molecular and Theoretical Biology.

Without argument, Dr. Mikhail Gelfand embodies the principles of the ISCB Fellow designation, demonstrating excellence in computational biology research and service to the computational biology community.  He is the first member of the Class of 2022 to receive this honor.

About the ISCB Fellows Program:

ISCB introduced the ISCB Fellows Program in 2009 to honor members that have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. During the inaugural year of the program, ISCB conferred the Fellow status on the seven winners-to-date of the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award, and recognized these distinguished scientists during the ISMB/ECCB 2009 conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Since then, ISCB has sought nominations from its community of members, which are reviewed and voted upon by a selection committee. New Fellows are introduced at each year's ISMB conference.

About ISCB:

Since its founding in 1997, the International Society for Computational Biology, Inc. (ISCB) has emerged as the leading professional society for participants in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. Society membership reflects commitment toward the advancement of computational biology. The ISCB is an international non-profit organization whose members come from the global bioinformatics and computational biology communities. The ISCB serves its global membership by providing high-quality meetings, publications, and reports on methods and tools; by disseminating key information about bioinformatics resources and relevant news from related fields; and by actively facilitating training, education, employment, career development, and networking. We advocate and provide leadership for resources and policies in support of scientific endeavors and to benefit society at large.

ISCB Stands in Solidarity with the People of Ukraine

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is shocked by the recent invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation military and condemns in the strongest possible terms this aggression towards a democratic state which posed no threat to the Russian Federation. This war has no reasonable basis. ISCB stands in solidarity with Ukraine and unequivocally supports UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call to end this senseless war. He stated on Feb. 23, “I must say, President Putin: In the name of humanity bring your troops back to Russia. In the name of humanity, do not allow to start in Europe what could be the worst war since the beginning of the century, with consequences not only devastating for Ukraine, not only tragic for the Russian Federation, but for the entire world”. Our deepest sympathy goes out to our Ukrainian research colleagues, the Ukrainian people, our Russian research colleagues who have openly condemned the actions of the Russian Federation government and all those around the world who have been affected by this invasion.

ISCB is deeply committed to peace and condemns any form of violence, harassment, and bullying. We are also committed to peaceful co-operation, mutual understanding, and tolerance across borders. ISCB recognizes that the actions of the Russian Federation government are not only crimes against the Ukrainian people but also crimes against the Russian people. We urge scientists and institutions to avoid cutting ties with Russian scientists — a move that would further increase the isolation of Russian science.

ISCB stands in solidarity with all who are working tirelessly to protect and safeguard democracy, human life and dignity. We continue to hope for reflection, restraint, and a swift end to the crisis.

ISCB Announces 2022 Award Recipients
Ron Shamir, Núria López-Bigas, Po-Ru Loh, Reinhard Schneider

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, Innovator Award, and Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award.

Ron Shamir, Tel Aviv University, is the winner of the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award. Núria López-Bigas, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, is the winner of the ISCB Innovator Award. Po-Ru Loh, Harvard Medical School/Broad Institute, is the Overton Prize winner. Reinhard Schneider, University of Luxembourg, has been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award.

Martin Vingron, ISCB Fellows, ISCB Awards Committee Chair remarked, “As chair of the Awards Selection Committee it gives me great pleasure to convey my heart-felt congratulations to this year’s awardees. Our community, as represented by the committee, admires these individuals’ outstanding achievements in research, training, and outreach.”

Dr. Shamir, Dr. Lopez-Bigas, and Dr. Loh will present distinguished keynote presentations at the upcoming ISMB 2022 in Madison, WI, USA, July 10 – 14. Dr. Schneider will be recognized at the conference prior to a distinguished keynote presentation. Mark your calendars and join us for ISMB 2022!

Professor Ron Shamir, PhD
Blavatnik School of Computer Science
Tel Aviv University, Israel

Recipient of ISCB Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award

The Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award recognizes a member of the computational biology community who is more than two decades post-degree and has made major contributions to the field of computational biology. Ron Shamir is being honored as the 2022 recipient of this award.••

Ron Shamir is a professor of Computer Science, and Founder and Head of the Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Prof. Shamir’s group develops algorithms and tools for analysis of genomic and systems biology data.

Ron Shamir made numerous ground breaking contributions to modern bioinformatics. Coming from theoretical computer science, his early contribution to biological applications concerned the problem of physical mapping. This was one of the pressing questions in the context of the sequencing of the human genome. He carried over insights from the study of interval graphs to DNA sequences and developed one of the first programs for large scale physical mapping. This work was done at a time, when bioinformatics as a field was still in an early stage and Ron Shamir through these contributions helped define the field and its methodology.

Over the years, Ron Shamir contributed landmark papers to many fields in computational biology. With his group he developed highly influential clustering and biclustering algorithms, the CLIQUE and SAMBA algorithms. Further work on gene expression analysis and networks has later been built on top of this, yielding, among others, the EXPANDER program. The prevalence of modularity in molecular biology, leading to the search for clusters in graphs, has been widely recognized in the last two decades. The accumulation of large-scale interaction data, such as protein-protein interaction networks, requires novel computational techniques that enable dissection of the high-dimensional genomic data. Although many bioinformatics approaches have been developed for dissection of network and similarity data separately, algorithms for joint analysis of both types of information were pioneered by Shamir’s group. Prof. Shamir proposed one of the first approaches to discovery of functional modules by identifying connected networks in the interaction data that exhibit high internal similarity. By imposing network topology constraints on clusters of gene expression data, he was able to detect weaker signals that evaded all other methods. Employing the methods he developed, Ron Shamir has pursued numerous collaborations with long-standing biological partners of his, producing many noteworthy results, e.g. on DNA repair mechanisms and on chromatin modifying enzymes.

Ron Shamir is known by many as a founding father of Israeli bioinformatics - he is the key person responsible for positioning Israeli bioinformatics among the top bioinformatics research schools. Shamir also contributed significantly to education in bioinformatics. He developed and taught one of the first courses in computational biology. Many colleagues have meanwhile profited from this material, which has become a de facto standard in bioinformatics teaching. Furthermore, many of Shamir’s graduate students are now themselves professors or group leaders, e.g., at the Weizmann Institute. Ron Shamir has also been highly active in the international bioinformatics community, in particular on the steering committee of the RECOMB conference and its satellite meetings. In the spring semester 2016, he organized a special semester at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley focussed on “Algorithmic Challenges in Genomics”, which attracted a large number of high-calibre researchers and many students.

Dr. Shamir is a researcher of extraordinary talent and breadth, influencer in bioinformatics, and a servant to the community. It is with great pleasure for ISCB to award him with this prestigious award.

Núria López-Bigas, PhD
Group Leader (ICREA Research Professor), Biomedical Genomics Group, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, Spain

Recipient of ISCB Innovator Award

The year 2016 marked the launch of the ISCB Innovator Award, which is given to a leading scientist who is within two decades of receiving the PhD degree, has consistently made outstanding contributions to the field, and continues to forge new directions. Núria López-Bigas is the 2022 recipient of the ISCB Innovator Award.

Nuria Lopez•-Bigas is a biologist with a PhD in molecular genetics of deafness. She transitioned into bioinformatics during her postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Since 2006, she leads a research group in Barcelona focused on the study of cancer from a genomics perspective.

Lopez-Bigas is a leading innovator in computational cancer biology. Her group has extensively characterized the mutational profiles of cancer cells as well as studying the underlying mutational processes that lead to cancer. Her thorough, careful, and innovative approaches have been instrumental in understanding the effects of chemotherapeutic on cancer and optimizing treatments. Lopez-Bigas’s research scope spans all the way from understanding the biochemical basis of mutation signatures, through to the clinical application where she is active in developing tools to support translational interpretation for clinical application.

Dr. Lopez-Bigas’s research analyses have detailed the different mutational processes affecting different cells and tissues, and the role of the DNA repair pathways in fixing DNA damage and mismatches. Her group has also examined how chromatin conformation, the presence of nucleosomes and DNA structure modify DNA damage and repair thereby shaping the rate at which mutations are accumulated in genomes.

Aside from research discoveries, Lopez-Bigas’s group has been at the forefront of developing software and data infrastructure for cancer research. She and her group have used their IntOGen pipeline to build a compendium of mutational cancer driver genes together with information about the mechanisms by which they contribute to tumorigenesis. They have also developed the Cancer Genome Interpreter tool which addresses the need to assess the biological and clinical importance of mutations detected in a tumor sample.

ISCB is honored to confer the 2022 Innovator Award to Nuria Lopez-Bigas.

Po-Ru Loh, PhD
Assistant Professor, Division of Genetics and Center for Data Sciences, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA

Recipient of the ISCB Overton Prize

The Overton Prize recognizes the research, education, and service accomplishments of early to mid-career scientists who are emerging leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics. The Overton Prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of G. Christian Overton, a leading bioinformatics researcher and a founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors. Po-Ru Loh is being recognized as the 2022 recipient of the Overton Prize.

Dr. Po-Ru Loh, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School, has pioneered the development of ultra-efficient algorithms in medical and population genetics, ushering in the era of biobank-scale genomics with two of the most widely-used statistical genetics tools in the past decade, Eagle2 and Bolt-LMM. His tools have powered the analysis of millions of genomes, revealing thousands of loci underlying human health and disease.

A hallmark of his work is that he has consistently devised sophisticated algorithms and statistics to solve the most pressing issues in computational genomics and provided highly-utilized software tools that implement these methods. He is well-known for his research contribution in the areas of haplotype phasing and imputation, linear mixed model methods for genome-wide association studies, medical and population genetics, genome mosaicism, and compressive genomics.

Loh’s innovations, contributions and ongoing potential at bringing sophisticated statistical techniques to transform computational genetics labels him one of the top computational genomics researchers of his generation. It is with great pleasure ISCB bestow this Overton Prize to Po-Ru Loh.

Prof. Reinhard Schneider, PhD
Professor, Chief Scientist, Bioinformatics, Head of Bioinformatics Core Facility, Université du Luxembourg

Recipient of the ISCB Outstanding Contributions Award

The Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award recognizes an ISCB member for outstanding service contributions toward the betterment of ISCB through exemplary leadership, education, and service. The 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award is Reinhard Schneider.

Reinhard Schneider is a Full Professor in Bioinformatics, and Head of Bioinformatics Core Facility and Head of ELIXIR Luxembourg Node at the University of Luxembourg. His research interests focus on the development of new bioinformatics algorithms in structure and function prediction of proteins. He is involved in various national and European projects in the areas of large data and knowledge management, high performance computing, data sustainability, disease mechanisms, and data integration across disciplines including medicine and patient data.

Throughout his career, Schneider has served ISCB in numerous positions, including, Member of the Board of Directors (2005 – 2020), ISCB Treasurer (2009 - 2016), and Vice-President (2005 - 2009). He also served as Head of Finance and Business Development Committee, and Head of Governance Committee. He co-organized ISMB 1999 in Heidelberg and he also served as Scientific Organizing Committee Member, Highlights Track Area Chair, or Steering Committee Member  for many of the ISMB and ISMB/ECCB conferences in the years since. In addition to committee service for ISMB, he also was involved in co-organizing several international ISCB Affiliated meetings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These meetings included ISCB Africa (2010: Bamako, Mali; 2011: Cape Town, South Africa) in cooperation with the African Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (ASBCB), ISCB Latin America (2010: Montevideo, Uruguay; 2014: Belo Horizonte, Brazil), and ISCB Asia (2011: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; 2012: Shen Zhen, China; 2013: Seoul, South Korea).

ISCB profited greatly from the management experience which Reinhard Schneider had gained  through his involvement in several startups. His gift for people management, working with lawyers and a wide range of finance people helped reshaping the Society. Together with a web developer, he redesigned the ISCB web-portal, that helped the members to easily navigate the necessary information and this web presence is well maintained till today. He introduced multi-year membership and other benefits to the members that attracted a lot of new members and boosted the memberships and revenues. In addition, during his time as treasurer, ISCB started to invest in funds that showed to give the Society greater financial security.

To further his contributions to the foundations of ISCB, Schneider was instrumental in the establishment of the ISCB Student Council (ISCB SC), a platform for students and trainees to become involved with ISCB. He played an important role of mentor/advocate for and support of the ISCBSC and also strongly supported ISCBSC’s Internship Initiative to help students from underprivileged countries by offering internships in his lab.

Reinhard Schneider is being recognized for his significant foundational contributions to both ISCB and the broad bioinformatics communities.  ISCB is honored to confer the 2022 Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award to Reinhard.