A Letter To Our ISCB Members and Colleagues

Burkhard Rost
BJ Morrison McKay
Economical hardships increasingly grind the advance of science. Of course, the pursuit of scientific discoveries must forge ahead against the growing funding stress. We have had to rethink our approach toward scientific questions, and be creative in our means of attacking problems toward results that benefit human health. Even last year when the U.S government enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, causing tens of thousands of scientific grant proposals to be submitted in short order in the hopes of capturing billions of dollars in new, short-term funding, each investigator hoped to be awarded funds and simultaneously wondered what he or she would do to keep their projects alive once the two-year spigot of funds dried up.

In the midst of all this uncertainty, ISCB is not just surviving – it is thriving! Our membership has not dipped as we thought it might, our ISMB attendance has not plummeted as we feared it could, and our financial position did not take an about-face and revert to earlier times when ISCB struggled to stay alive. We couldn’t be more pleased to report that our membership, conference attendance and finances have all remained relatively solid and stable during these turbulent times. Now that we got this far, we need to stabilize this unexpected trend and grow more. To achieve this, we continue to make careful, thoughtful decisions on when and how to spend our limited resources toward the accomplishment of our mission and for the benefit of ISCB members worldwide. One way we are joyfully doing that this year is with more travel fellowships. At the start of this year, ISCB committed 3,600 USD in travel fellowship funding support to the Student Council for distribution among its selected leaders and leaders of their Regional Student Groups. More recently, the ISCB Board of Directors contributed an additional 10,000 USD of Society funds toward 10-15 ISMB 2010 student travel fellowships from among the competitive application process. Your Board made this move because, although funding is tight all over, and travel costs are among the largest of impediments to attending a conference, we recognize that at this critical but resource-limited stage in their research careers, this type of support can be immeasurable to our student and trainee communities. Your Board is committed to supporting our up-and-coming researchers, and our current financial position enables us to do this. Together with US government grants (DOE, NIGMS/NIH and NSF), ISCB will provide over 80 ISMB travel fellowships to students and post docs.

Did you know that in addition to this year’s ISMB, for many years ISCB has also funded annual travel fellowships for our student/post doc members to attend ECCB, InCoB, PSB and RECOMB. Since 2002 this has amounted to over 100,000 USD in funding, and resulted in over 150 travel fellowship awards to ISCB members to attend some of the most important scholarly conferences of our science. If you are a dues paying member of ISCB, you should be very proud to know that your membership dues are put to good use! If you are not a paying member and would like to support our travel fellowships initiative, please visit our website and consider making a donation today. All donations, from members and non-members alike, are welcome, and no amount is too big or too small to make a real difference. With our student community well attended to, both from ISCB and from the grand efforts of the ISCB Student Council, our next challenge is in making an ISCB membership more compelling to our entire scientific community by increasing the benefits that are available to all members.

ISCB Treasurer Reinhard Schneider has dedicated himself to arranging and implementing a variety of new benefits, from Google Apps accounts for all members (free you@iscb.org email address to publish with papers because it stays with you through your career), to the new ISCB Scicasts channel (enabling the latest news from ISCB and the field to feed directly to you at whatever frequency you choose). Together with our web team, Reinhard has shown enormous dedication to improving and enhancing the value of an ISCB membership.

A new institutional membership category will be available when you read this as our latest effort to expand membership. If you are with a research institute that may be interested in this type of membership option, be sure to read the related article in this newsletter. Together with our expanded Affiliates Program, that now includes regional centers and institutes, in addition to the traditional regional membership groups, our vision for ISCB is one that is truly representative of the diversity of scientists and organizations contributing toward the advancement of the worldwide understand of living systems through computation.

Another initiative launched last year was the incredibly successfully expansion of ISCB’s regional meetings. In November/December the first ISCB Africa meeting, in partnership with our African affiliate, ASBCB, took place in Bamako, Mali. The energy of the attendees, and their enthusiastic desire to absorb as much science as possible in the few short days of the meeting, was awe-inspiring. Incredibly, we were able to replicate that enthusiastic response in March of this year at the ISCB Latin America conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. In both cases, these meetings were inspired by proposals from ISCB Student Council leaders, Manuel Corpas in the case of Africa, and Lucia Peixoto in the case of Latin America. They each had a dream to bring ISCB meetings to developing regions, and your ISCB Board wholeheartedly embraced their visionary proposals. Plans are already underway for the 2nd ISCB Africa, being held March 9-11, 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa, and initial conversations are underway for the next two ISCB Latin America meetings in 2012 and 2014 as well. Soon a call for proposals will also be distributed to initiate a search for a location and date of the first ISCB Asia meeting. Full details will be posted to the ISCB website Conferences page when available.

And speaking of meetings, many of you reading this are at ISMB 2010 in Boston right now. This 18th annual conference is where we direct the majority of ISCB’s human resources, to which the bulk of ISCB’s expenditures go, and from which about 30-40% of our income continues to come. The success of ISCB remains largely tied to the success of ISMB, and over the years, to ensure that success, we have established a pattern of presenting a massively parallel scientific event in order to attract the best submissions and present the highest quality of science possible. We make a concerted effort to welcome all branches of computational biology, and are especially committed to addressing the reality of our interdisciplinary field by ensuring opportunities for computational and experimental scientists to contribute equally. In a nutshell, we strive to make ISMB the forum that successfully unites the varied entities of our field, under one roof, all at one time.

In the ISMB 2010 program book that is distributed to all attendees on a flash drive, and available to everyone, everywhere on the conference website, the many volunteers who made this meeting possible have been thanked, so we will not repeat the extent of that praise here. But, we do want to call your attention to the tremendous accomplishments of our first-ever all-female triumphant trio of conference chairs - Olga Troyanskaya, Michal Linial and Jill Mesirov - who have shaped this event into something exceptional. And, Steven Leard also shares that spotlight of gratitude for his expertise in managing the logistical arrangements with a professional poise unequaled in the meeting-planning field.

Looking ahead: ISMB/ECCB 2011 will return to Vienna, Austria, July 17-19 (with pre-conference SIGs and Tutorials July 15-16). The return to the Austria Center Vienna is a first for ISMB and ECCB. Never before have we repeated a location, but we intend to do this again in order to save resources. We are looking for a few places that all organizers and attendees overwhelmingly enjoyed and that we could use as return sites. Please help spread the word about Vienna and be sure to make your own plans now to attend.

Meanwhile, surviving the economic storms of these past years has made us all stronger. Therefore, we bid you to embrace the challenges and opportunities you may face in daily life and research, and never forget to have fun – we fully support the concept that science should be fun, and we hope you do as well! Be sure to make the most of your time in Boston, or wherever you may be as you read this newsletter.

Sincerely,

BJ Morrison McKay , Executive Officer

Burkhard Rost, President