Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
ISCB Cyrus Chothia, Curtis Huttenhower, and Larry Hunter Named 2015 ISCB Award Winners
The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award, Overton Prize, and the inaugural Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award. Cyrus Chothia, Emeritus Group Leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England has been selected as the winner of the 2015 Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award. This year’s Overton Prize honors Curtis Huttenhower from the Harvard School of Public Health, and Larry Hunter from the University of Colorado School of Medicine is the first recipient of Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award.
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| 2015 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award: Cyrus Chothia |
The ISCB Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award recognizes leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics for their significant contributions to these fields through research, education, and service.
Cyrus Chothia was selected as the 2015 recipient for his groundbreaking work using computation to understand protein structure and function and the evolution of genomes. Chothia is well known for using computation to study protein structure, and his early work showed that relatively simple principles govern the structure of proteins, regardless of the structural complexity. His research has been critical to understanding and classifying proteins based on structural folds, and he has shown that changes to a protein sequence can be accommodated by structural shifts. More recently, Chothia developed computational approaches based on his knowledge of protein structure to understand how gene duplication and recombination between particular domains drives genome evolution. Chothia’s illustrious career includes election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000. He has mentored numerous students and postdoctoral fellows, and many are now rising leaders in their respective fields. Chothia’s work throughout his career has been instrumental to the birth of the fields of structural bioinformatics and computational genomics.
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| 2015 Overton Prize Winner: Curtis Huttenhower |
The Overton Prize recognizes early or mid-career scientists who are emerging leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics for their accomplishments in research, education, and service. The Overton Prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of G. Christian Overton, a leading bioinformatics researcherand founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors. Curtis Huttenhower is this year’s winner of the Overton Prize for his groundbreaking research on microbial communities, with a focus on the human microbiome.
Huttenhower is an Associate Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has worked on developing novel computational tools to analyze the large, complex datasets associated with microbial communities and NIH Human Microbiome Project. Huttenhower’s research has provided new insights into how microbial communities impact human health and disease. His research potential has been recognized through the receipt of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and an NSF CAREER Award.
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| 2015 Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award: Larry Hunter |
2015 marks the inaugural recognition of an ISCB member with the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award for his or her outstanding service contributions toward the betterment of ISCB through exemplary leadership, education, and service. Larry Hunter is the first winner of this award for his instrumental role in the foundation of ISCB as a scientific society.
Hunter is a Professor and Director of the Center for Computational Biology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. His computational biology research interests include biomedical text mining and knowledge-based computational techniques for analysis of high-throughput data. Hunter began his career as a programmer at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), where he developed a database of researchers interested in artificial intelligence and molecular biology. He invited researchers from this database to a joint NLM-NSF meeting on artificial intelligence in molecular biology in 1992. This meeting developed into the Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology Meeting (ISMB). By 1996, ISMB had emerged as the premier meeting for computational biology research, and members of previous ISMB steering committees concluded that this unique interdisciplinary field needed its own professional society. This group of committee members created the International Society of Computational Biology and elected Larry Hunter as its first president. Hunter has gone on to serve ISCB in many other capacities and continues to be closely involved with ISCB.
ISCB will present the Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, and Outstanding Contributions to ISCB at the joint 23rd Annual ISMB/14th Annual European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) being held in Dublin, Ireland, July 10-14th, 2015. Chothia, Huttenhower, and Hunter will present keynote talks during ISMB/ECCB 2015.
Full bibliographical articles profiling the award recipients will be available in the ISMB/ECCB 2015 focus issue of the ISCB newsletter later this year, as well as the ISCB Society Pages in PLOS Computational Biology and OUP Bioinformatics.
| UPCOMING CONFERENCE DEADLINES |
| Highlights Deadline 27-February-2015 |
| Posters Deadline 12-March-2015 |
| LBR Submissions Closes 27-March-2015 |
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Outstanding SIGs and Satellite Meetings to be held at ISMB/ECCB 2015!Mark Your Calendar for the SIG & Satellite Meeting line-up at ISMB/ECCB 2015!!
ISMB/ECCB 2015 will hold a number of one and two-day specialized meetings in computational biology. These meetings consist of Special Interest Group Meetings (SIGs) and Satellite Meetings (SMs) and will be held prior to the main conference. A SIG is a one- or two- day focused workshop. It provides a broad and/or deep perspective on developments in a field of research, and is intended as a way to address a topic more extensively than can be done in the main conference.
Satellite Meetings
SIGS (Special Interest Groups)
See you in Dublin!
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ISCB Buzz: Conference Deadlines, FASEB 2016 Science Awards, Cytoscape at RSG & the Advancement & Challenges in Computational BiologyISMB Proceedings - Deadline: January 16!
ISMB/ECCB 2015 will bring together Bioinformaticians and Computational Biologists working in a wide range of disciplines, including molecular biology, biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and statistics. Papers that demonstrate both the development of new computational techniques and their application to Molecular and Systems Biology, with significant outcomes to biomedical, agricultural, and environmental questions are especially encouraged.
GLBIO Proceedings - Deadline: February 1st!
Full length papers and abstracts are solicited for oral and poster presentations at the 10th Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference, an official conference of the International Society for Computational Biology. This call is an invitation to scientists and professionals working in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology to submit high quality original research papers for presentation at GLBIO 2015.
Africa Registration & Late-breaking Posters
ISCB-Africa ASBCB Bioinformatics Conference, open for registration, welcomes late-breaking original research poster submissions! Posters are intended to convey a scientific result that is original work, and are not advertisements for commercial software packages. Posters may cover any area of computational biology. Click here for more information!
RECOMB 2015 Call for Posters & Highlights
RECOMB 2015 invites the submission of abstracts of papers that have been published in a journal after October 1, 2013 or papers that are "in press" at the time of submission and are already linked on the journal web site.
FASEB 2016 Excellence in Science Award Nominations!
FASEB is seeking nominations for its 2016 Excellence in Science Award that recognizes the significant accomplishments of women scientists. We look forward to another list of nominees that reads like a 'Who's Who' of international science, containing the names of outstanding women in science who have accomplished scientific work of lasting impact and have contributed substantially to training the next generation of scientists.
Cytoscape at RSG 2014!
The Cytoscape team was thrilled to be a part of this year's Regulatory and Systems Genomics conference along with DREAM Challenges. Thanks to support from the National Resource for Network Biology (http://nrnb) and Agilent Technologies, we were able to host a number of unique events integrated into the meeting.
Advancements & Challenges in Computational Biology
Ruth Nussinov, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Computational Biology & ISCB Fellow gives a detailed perspective on significant computational biology advances of the last decade, and reflects on some key challenges ahead.
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The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announces new Fight Against Ebola Award
The Ebola virus (EBOV), causing the Ebola virus disease (EVD) maintains a high fatality that has killed over 5,000 individuals in the current outbreak from February to Nov 26, 2014. First reports assessing spreading risk have been published (Gomes, et al., 2014). Recently, 99 Ebola virus genomes from 78 patients have been analyzed (Gire, et al., 2014). To facilitate global research, the respective author team made all their data freely available. This laudable decision aligns with the ISCB Open Access policy (Lathrop, et al., 2011; Lathrop, et al., 2011).
In response to the immediate need for solutions in the field of computational biology against Ebola, The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announces the Fight Against Ebola Award. ISCB will give out the Fight Against Ebola Award, along with a prize of $2000, at its July 2016 annual meeting (ISCB ISMB 2016, Orlando, Florida). All computational approaches should include a significant component of Ebola research. In the development of any modern drug, computational biology is positioned to contribute through comparative analysis of the genome sequences of Ebola strains, and 3-D protein modeling. Other computational approaches to Ebola include large-scale docking studies of Ebola proteins with human proteins and with small-molecule libraries, computational modeling of the spread of the virus, computational mining of the Ebola literature, and creation of a curated Ebola database. Taken together, such computational efforts could significantly accelerate traditional scientific approaches.
ISCB is dedicated to advancing the understanding of living systems through computation. ISCB now represents more than 3200 computational biologists working in over 70 countries. It organizes more than seven annual international meetings, and confers several major prizes, including the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award, ISCB Innovator Award, the ISCB Overton Prize, and the ISCB Outstanding Contributions Award. With the ISCB Fight Against Ebola Award the society offers for the first time an award for a specific scientific objective thereby acknowledging the urgency of action to fight a rising challenge.
Submission and Judgment Criteria
The award will be conferred on the submission that most closely meets the goal of providing an immediate solution from the field of computational biology as assessed according to the following terms: (1) high impact, (2) broad access, (3) measurable outcomes on understanding, handling, treating, or preventing the disease, and (4) close interaction with established mechanisms of Ebola control and research.
A selected team comprising experts chosen from areas such as Ebola research, epidemiology, public health, computational virology, structural biology, vaccine development, translational bioinformatics, genomics, and genome analysis will assess all submissions. We will only consider submissions that remain within a limit of two pages. Please note that your submission could be in the style of a journal paper. Be advised of the following constraints when fitting your material onto the two pages: (1) the typeface must be Arial font throughout, using a minimum 9-pt font size for figures and a minimum of 10-pt Arial for the text. The precise minimum page margins depend on your choice of format (US-letter: a minimum of 1.25 inches on top and bottom and a minimum of 2.5 inches at the sides; A4: a minimum of 3 cm on top and bottom and a minimum of 1.5 cm on both sides.)
Submissions must be sent via email (a single PDF document) to Diane Kovats (
Thank you to the ISCB Ebola Award Task Force for their hard work in the development of the award. Those members include:
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Gire, S.K., et al. Genomic surveillance elucidates Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak. Science 2014;345(6202):1369-1372.
Gomes, M.F.C., et al. Assessing the International Spreading Risk Associated with the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak. PLOS Currents Outbreaks 2014.
Lathrop, R.H., et al. ISCB public policy statement on open access to scientific and technical research literature. Bioinformatics 2011;27(3):291-294.
Lathrop, R.H., et al. ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature. PLoS computational biology 2011;7(2):e1002014.
| UPCOMING CONFERENCE DEADLINES | ||||||
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| Shop while you Support ISCB on AmazonSmile! | ||||||
| AmazonSmile is a simple and automatic way for you to support ISCB every time you shop, at no cost to you. When you shop at smile.amazon.com, you’ll find the exact same low prices, vast selection and convenient shopping experience as Amazon.com, with the added bonus that Amazon will donate a portion of the purchase price to ISCB! Sign up Now! |
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ISCB Buzz: Conference Updates, SIGs at ISMB/ECCB 2015, Outgoing Board Members, FASEB Releases Report & DREAM9.5 ChallengesBook your Hotel for ISCB Africa & SAVE!
Join your colleagues for this 3 day conference featuring over 35 research presentations including 5 outstanding keynote speakers! Register today for non-stop networking, training & learning!.
Mark your calendar for the SIG line-up at ISMB/ECCB 2015!
ISMB/ECCB 2015 will hold a number of one and two-day specialized meetings in computational biology. These meetings consist of Special Interest Group Meetings (SIGs) and Satellite Meetings (SMs) and will be held prior to the main conference. A SIG meeting is a one- or two-day focused workshop. It provides a broad and/or deep perspective on developments in a field of research, and is intended as a way to address a topic more extensively than can be done in the main conference. .
VIZBI 2015: Early Registration Closing February 7!
VIZBI 2015, an Affiliate conference of ISCB, will take place on March 25-27 at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA. It features 21 invited talks from high-profile speakers on the state-of-the-art and challenges in visualizing a diverse range of biological data, an Art and Biology evening, and poster and breakout sessions!
FASEB Sustaining Discover Report
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) released an analysis of the threats to continued progress in biological and medical science research. Sustaining Discovery in Biological and Medical Science: A Framework for Discussion examines the challenges facing researchers and presents a series of recommendations to alleviate them.
The DREAM9.5 Challenges
We are pleased to announce that the DREAM Olfaction Prediction Challenge, the first of the DREAM9.5 Challenges is now open for participation. This Challenge focuses on predicting behavioral responses to a panel of odors, and features a first-of-its-kind dataset.
Thank you to the ISCB Outgoing Board Members!
As ISCB transitions leadership, we want to sincerely thank our outgoing board members, Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Guilherme Oliveira, Avinash Shanmugam, & Hershel Safer, for their exemplary service. They have shown constant support and dedication to the growth and development of the Society over the past years. The Society hopes and encourages all past members to continue to be engaged in other society activities & initiatives.
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