Links within this page: About ISMB | ISMB Mission | ISMB History | Past ISMB Conferences | Future ISMB | ISCB/ECCB Collaboration | ISMB/ECCB 2025
About ISMB
The ISMB conferences began in 1993 and were the driving force behind the founding of the International Society for Computational Biology in 1997, which has been organizing this conference ever since. ISCB is the only society representing computational biology on a worldwide scale and its flagship conference ISMB has become the largest conference on computational biology worldwide. ISCB continues to see ISMB as its major flagship annual event.
ISMB Mission
The ISMB conference series aims at attracting the top research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology. Typical, but not exclusive, the topics of interest are: Sequence analysis, Evolution and phylogeny, Comparative genomics, Protein structure, Molecular and supramolecular dynamics, Molecular evolution, Gene regulation and transcriptomics, Proteomics, Systems biology, Ontologies, data bases and data integration, Text mining and information extraction, and Human health. The conference also aims to attract participants from related disciplines in order to understand the need that exists for computational approaches in related fields, and to gain from approaches taken in other disciplines that might be appropriate for computational biology.
ISMB History
The Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, known today as simply ISMB, was started in the early 1990's to bring together researchers with an interest in applying a computational approach to biological investigation. At that time it was challenging to find people who did this work in either computer science or molecular biology, as few scientists in either discipline had a clear idea of what bioinformatics was or how to find other people doing it.
Therefore, Lawrence Hunter, then a programmer at the US National Library of Medicine, put to use a popular database he had generated of researchers interested in artificial intelligence and molecular biology from research papers and conference mailing lists by inviting those researchers to a 1992 joint NLM meeting with the National Science Foundation on the future of what was then termed artificial intelligence in molecular biology. The following year, the meeting evolved into the first Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held in Washington DC. That first ISMB attracted approximately 200 scientists; today more than 1500 show up.
In August 2012 PLoS Computational Biology published an article authored by Todd Gibson titled, "The Roots of Bioinformatics in ISMB." The article weaves together the story of ISMB through interviews conducted by the author with several of the founding fathers of the ISMB conference. The results is an interesting look into the origins and maturation of the conference series.
Past keynote addresses. One of the highlights of each ISMB conference is a collection of keynotes delivered by researchers of the highest international esteem who are asked to inform the community of historical perspectives or landmark advances in computational and experimental research, and inject new directions into the field of computational molecular biology. Past keynote speakers are listed below (affiliations are accurate to the year the keynote was given)
- Uri Alon (Weizmann Inst of Sci; '04)
- Stephen Altschul (NCBI; '02)
- David Altschuler (Harvard; '10)
- Michale Ashburner (EBI-'02; U of Cambridge-'11)
- David Baker (U of Washington; '02)
- Amos Bairoch (U of Geneva; '99)
- David Balaban (Affymetrix; '99)
- Ziv Bar-Joseph (Carnegie Mellon U; '12)
- Alexis Battle (John Hopkins University '19)
- Ewan Birney (EBI; '05)
- Bonnie Berger (MIT; '11,'19)
- Mathieu Blanchette (McGill U; '06)
- Tom Blundell (U of Cambridge; '06)
- Steven Brenner (UC Berkeley; '10)
- Sydney Brenner (Salk Inst; '03)
- Søren Brunak (DTU; '07)
- Douglas Brutlag (Stanford; '95)
- Bruce Buchanan (U of Pittsburg; '94)
- Chris Burge (MIT; '01)
- Stephen Burley (SGX; '07)
- Howard Cash (Gene Codes; '05)
- Robert Cedergren (U of Montreal; '98)
- George Church (Harvard; '10)
- Elena Conti (EMBL; '06)
- Eugenia Maria del Pino Veintimilla (PUCE; '09)
- Charles DeLisi (Boston U; '06)
- Christophe Dessimoz (University of Lausanne '19)
- Christopher Dobson (U of Oxford; '01)
- Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie U; '02)
- Russell Doolittle (UCSD; '96)
- Richard Durbin (Wellcome Trust Sanger Inst; '12)
- Sean Eddy (Washington U; '01)
- Gerald Edelman (Neurosciences Inst; '00)
- Manfred Eigen (Max-Planck Goettingen; '99)
- Michael Eisen (Berkely; '07)
- David Eisenberg (UCLA; '01)
- Claire Fraser-Liggett (U of Maryland; '08)
- Terry Gaasterland (Rockefeller U; '02)
- Anne-Claude Gavin (EMBL; '07)
- Pierre-Henri Gouyon (MNHN/CNRS; '09)
- Eric Green (NIH-NHGRI; '04)
- David Haussler (UCSC; '96 & '08)
- Barry Honig (Columbia U; '02)
- Leroy Hood (Inst for Sys Bio; '00 & '04)
- Robert Huber (Max-Planck Munich; '06)
- Bernardo Huberman (Hewlett Packard Labs; '01)
- Peter J Hunter (U of Auckland; '05)
- Lawrence Hunter (NLM; '94, '12)
- Trey Ideker (UCSD; '09)
- David Jaffe (Broad Inst; '08)
- Fotis Kafatos (EMBL; '07)
- Minoru Kanehisa (Kyoto U; '00)
- Richard Karp (U of Washington; '99)
- Anthony Kerlavage (Celera; '99)
- Daphne Koller (Stanford; '09)
- Eugene Koonin (NCBI/NLM; '99)
- Eric Lander (MIT)
- Richard Lathrop (UC Irvine; '97, '12)
- Thomas Lengauer (Max-Planck Saarbrucken; '09)
- Mike Levine (UC Berkeley)
- Susan Lindquist (Whitehead Inst; '10)
- David Lipman (NIH-NCBI; '04)
- Matthias Mann (CEBI; '99 & '04)
- Hanah Margalit (Hebrew U of Jerusalem; '08)
- John Mattick (Queensland; '07)
- J Andrew McCammon (UCSD; '00)
- Marcie McClure (U of Nevada; '97)
- Jill Mesirov (Broad Inst; '05)
- Webb Miller (PA State U; '09)
- Satoru Miyano (U of Tokyo; '05)
- Gene Myers (Celera-'00 & HMMI-'08)
- Denis Noble (U of Oxford; '04)
- William Stafford Noble, University of Washington, '19)
- Erin O'Shea (HHMI; '07)
- Svante Paabo (Max-Planck Leipzig; '04 &'10)
- Bernard O Palsson (UCSD; '08)
- Morag Park (McGill; '08)
- Pavel Pevzner (UCSD; '05)
- Tomaso Poggio (MIT; '09)
- Nikolaus Rajewsky (Helmholtz Association Berlin-Buch'19)
- Aviv Regev (Broad Inst; '08)
- John Reinitz (SUNY; '02)
- Isidore Rigoutsos (IBM; '02)
- Richard J Roberts (New England Biolabs; '94 & '06)
- Gerald Rubin (HHMI)
- Andrej Sali (UCSF; '12)
- Chris Sander (EMBL-'96, MIT-'01, MSKCC-'10)
- David Sankoff (Otttawa)
- Harold Scheraga (Cornell U; '00)
- Renee Schroeder (U of Vienna; '07)
- David Searls (SKB; '00)
- Eran Segal (Weizmann Inst; '07)
- Luis Serrano (Ctr for Genomic Regulation; '11)
- Temple Smith (Boston U; '07)
- Terry Speed (UC Berkely; '07)
- Michale J E Sternberg (Imperial Cancer Research Fund; '99)
- John Sulston (Sanger Ctr; '95)
- Janet Thornton (U College London-'95, EBI-'05 & '11)
- Anna Tramontano (U of Rome; '04)
- Olga Troyanskaya (Princeton; '11)
- Mathias Uhlen (KTH; '09)
- Alfonso Valencia (CNIO; '11)
- Craig Venter (Celera)
- Gunnar von Heijne (Stockholm U; '01, '05, '12)
- Michael Waterman (USC; '98, '06),
- obert Waterston (Washington U St. Louis; '96)
- Robert Weinberg (Whitehead Inst; '10)
- Hans Westerhoff (Vrije U; '97)
- Shoshana Wodak (U of Brussells; '98)
- Barbara Wold (CalTech; '12)
- Kurt Wuethrich (ETH; '06)
Past ISMB Conferences
- ISMB/ECCB 2025, July 20-25, Liverpool, England
- ISMB 2024, July 12-16, Montréal, Quebec, Canada
- ISMB/ECCB 2023, July 23-27, Lyon, France
- ISMB 2022, July 10-14, 2022, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
- ISMB/ECCB 2021, July 25-30, 2021, Virtual Event
- ISMB 2020, July 13-16, 2020, Virtual Event
- ISMB/ECCB 2019, July 21-25, 2019, Basel, Switzerland
- ISMB 2018, July 06-10, 2017, Chicago, Illinois, USA
- ISMB/ECCB 2017, July 21-25, 2017, Prague, Czech Republic
- ISMB 2016, July 08-12, 2016, Orlando, Florida, USA
- ISMB/ECCB 2015, July 10-14, 2015, Dublin, Leinster, Ireland
- ISMB 2014, July 11-15, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- ISMB/ECCB 2013, July 21-23, 2011, Berlin, Germany
- ISMB 2012, July 15-17, 2012, Long Beach, California, USA
- ISMB/ECCB 2011, July 17-19, 2011, Vienna, Austria
- ISMB 2010, July 11-13, 2010, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- ISMB/ECCB 2009, June 27 - July 2, 2009, Stockholm, Sweden
- ISMB 2008, July 19-23, 2008, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- ISMB/ECCB 2007, July 21-25, 2007, Vienna, Austria
- ISMB 2006, August 6 - 11, 2006, Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil
- ISMB 2005 June 25-29, 2005, Detroit, Michigan, USA
- ISMB/ECCB 2004 (a joint meeting in conjunction with GPCVIII) August 1 - 5, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
- ISMB 2003 June 29 - July 3, 2003; Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
- ISMB 2002 August 3-7, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
- ISMB 2001 July 21-25, 2001, Copenhagen, Denmark
- ISMB 2000 August 20-23, 2000, La Jolla, California, USA
- ISMB 1999 August 6-10, 1999, Heidelberg, Germany
- ISMB 1998 June 28-July 1, 1998, Montrèal, Quèbec, Canada
- ISMB 1997 June 21-25, 1997, Halkidiki, Greece
- ISMB 1996 June 12-15, 1996, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
- ISMB 1995 July 16-19, 1995, Cambridge, England, UK
- ISMB 1994 August 14-17, 1994, Palo Alto, California, USA
- ISMB 1993 July 6-9, 1993, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
- ISMB 1993 Abstract
- ISMB 1993 Proceedings
Future ISMB Conferences
- ISMB/ECCB 2025, July 20-24, Liverpool, England
- ISMB 2026, July 12-16, Washington, DC, United States
- ISMB/ECCB 2027, July 18-22, Copenhagen, Denmark
- ISMB 2028, July 23 - 27, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Dates are subject to change without notice
ISCB/ECCB Collaboration
The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) has been organized annually since 2002 by a panel of European Computational Biologists and is the only pan-European conference series in this field. In 2004 ISMB and the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) joined forces in a common meeting that was by many standards perceived as the most successful such meeting in computational biology to-date. ECCB and ISCB have agreed to share their main meetings whenever ISMB meets in Europe, which is currently planned to be every other year (odd numbered years).
The next common meeting will be ISMB/ECCB 2025 - July 20 - 24, 2025, Liverpool, England.
