Fellows Selection Committee
The Fellows Selection Committee (FSC) is comprised of no more than nine Fellows composed of a diverse (gender, ethnicity, scientific expertise, geography, Fellow type, etc.) group of Fellows. The role of the FSC is to execute the ISCB Fellows election process. The committee shall take into consideration all requirements and criteria that have been established for the ISCB Fellows program (https://www.iscb.org/fellows), while taking into consideration the importance of equity, diversity, and inclusion in representing our scientific field. The end result of the committee’s work will be the Class of Fellows for the ISCB Board of Directors ratification.
Download the Fellows Election Process (.pdf)
The 2025 Fellows Selection Committee:
Chair: Tandy Warnow
Tandy Warnow is Associate Head, Department of Computer Science, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her research combines computer science, statistics, and discrete mathematics, focusing on developing improved models and algorithms for reconstructing complex and large-scale evolutionary histories.
Bissan Al-Lazikani
Bissan Al-Lazikani is a data scientist and drug discoverer. She applies data science and machine learning to address key challenges in cancer drug discovery and development. Her research focuses on bringing the power of Data and Artificial Intelligence to address these hurdles, accelerating drug discovery and de-risking innovation. Specifically, she applies data science approaches to integrate multi-disciplinary and multi-modal data to inform all aspects of cancer translational research; and to develop novel machine learning algorithms that learn from these integrated data. Together, her approaches inform decision-making and experimental design throughout the drug discovery and development pipeline. She led the development of the world’s largest public cancer drug discovery platform (canSAR.ai) to inform target selection and prioritization for drug discovery.
Paul Flicek
Paul Flicek is the Chief Data Science Officer at The Jackson Laboratory and Honorary Professor of Genomics and Computational Biology at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on comparative approaches to understand genome biology, transcriptional regulation and human disease. During his career, he has worked on aspects of genome annotation, comparative genomics, and large-scale biological data generation projects. Notably, his team developed Ensembl, a leading resource for reference genomics data, and launched the European Genome-phenome Archive of human data consented for biomedical research.
Hanah Margalit
Hanah Margalit is a Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She studies regulation of gene expression by non-coding RNAs and its integration with transcription regulation and post-transcriptional regulation by endoribonucleases. Her laboratory is interdisciplinary, combining state-of-the-art wet-lab experiments and advanced computational analyses.
Christine Orengo
Christine Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London and an expert in structural bioinformatics, functional genomics and protein function prediction. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, UK and an Elected Member of EMBO. She is a past President of ISCB (term ends January 2024) and member of the Board of Directors. She also serves on the COSI Advisory Group, Conferences Advisory Committee, and Green ISCB Task Force.
Laxmi Parida
Laxmi Parida is an IBM Master Inventor and group leader in computational genomics at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York. She spearheads innovative research initiatives in the areas of Computational genomics, Pattern Discovery, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Population Genomics, Comparative Genomics, NGS Analysis, Bioinformatics, Cancer Genomics, and Topological Data Analysis.
Ben Raphael
Ben Raphael is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. His research focuses on computational genomics, developing algorithms to study cancer, genome evolution, and single-cell data. He leads efforts in algorithmic approaches for biological data analysis, advancing discoveries in precision medicine and evolutionary biology.
David Sankoff
David Sankoff is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Ottawa and a founding figure in bioinformatics and computational biology. He is celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions to genome evolution, including the development of comparative genomics algorithms and sequence alignment methods. His work laid the foundation for analyzing genome rearrangements and phylogenetics, influencing research on evolutionary relationships across species. Through his mathematical and computational innovations, he continues to provide profound insights into genome structure and evolution.
Fengzhu Sun
Fengzhu Sun is a Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. A leading expert in computational biology, he has made substantial contributions to genome analysis, molecular networks, metagenomics, and statistical bioinformatics. His research focuses on developing algorithms and models for understanding genetic variations, molecular networks and microbial communities. By combining statistical approaches and high-throughput sequencing data, he has enabled critical discoveries in genomics and their applications in health and disease.
Shoshana Wodak
Shoshana Wodak is a Professor and visiting Group Leader at the Vlaamse Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), Flemish Free University of Brussels. She is a pioneer in docking algorithms for protein interactions. She identified structural motifs in proteins, defined domains, and investigated the role of local interactions in protein stability and folding. Her teams developed computational protein design methods, simulated reactions and interactions in protein systems, and analyzed cellular pathways and protein networks.
Xuegong Zhang, Fellows Council Observer
Xuegong Zhang is the Director of the Bioinformatics Division at BNRIST (Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology) and Professor at Tsinghua University. His work is pivotal in shaping the landscape of Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics. His interdisciplinary approach has facilitated the mining of faint signals from few samples and the integration of diverse datasets to model and simulate complex biological processes, enabling us to comprehend life at a cellular and molecular level.