ISCB Newsletter 11-1

Spotlight on ISCB Affiliated Regional Group: Report on 11th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium

Submitted by Hershel Safer, Weizmann Institute of Science

The 11th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium, the annual meeting of the Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ISBCB), was held on April 27th, 2008, at Tel Aviv University (TAU). Approximately 400 people attended the meeting, which was chaired by Roded Sharan of TAU. Nir Friedman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) was Program Chair.

Chris Sander of Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center gave the opening keynote presentation: “Cancer genomics and modeling combinatorial perturbation of cells.” Ehud Gazit of TAU gave a keynote talk entitled “Nanobiotechnology: From biochemical self-assembly to novel bionanomaterials.” Ed Trifonov of the University of Haifa received a Distinguished Membership Award in tribute to his seminal contributions to bioinformatics research. The conference continued its tradition of introducing new faculty to the local community. This year’s roster included Michal Ziv-Ukelson of Ben Gurion University (BGU), Uri Gophna of TAU, Masha Niv of HUJI, and Amos Tanay and Koby Levy of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Prizes were awarded for the five best student posters of the 86 that were exhibited. Abstracts of all posters, including the award winners, are available on the conference website. For additional information on the Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology please visit the Society’s website: www.weizmann.ac.il/ISBCB/ For further details on the 11th Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium, including links to past meetings, please visit the conference website: www.cs.tau.ac.il/~ibs08/