Links within this page: About ISMB | ISMB Mission | ISMB History | 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.

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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.

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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)

Past ISMB Conferences - click here.

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Future ISMB Conferences

Dates are subject to change without notice

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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.

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