WOMEN IN SCIENCE - KEYNOTE TALKS SHINE SPOTLIGHT ON CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH

Each year, ISCB meetings feature keynote speakers who give talks on innovative research in computational biology and bioinformatics. These scientists are respected leaders in their fields and come from every corner of the globe. In 2014, ten women were among the keynote speakers who were selected based on their cutting edge work. Many of these women are deeply involved in service to ISCB and consider their membership in the Society as an important professional affiliation.

Bissan Al-Lazikani, PhD

Bissan Al-Lazikani, PhD, leads the Computational Biology & Chemogenomics team in the Division of Cancer Therapeutics at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, United Kingdom. Al-Lazikani received her Doctorate in computational structural biology from Cambridge University. During her postdoctoral training, she used structure analysis and modeling to understand SH2 domains. Al-Lazikani subsequently worked at a biotechnology company specializing in drug discovery, where she helped build a chemogenomics database. Presently, Al-Lazikani directs a group that develops and uses computational tools for cancer drug discovery.

Al-Lazikani has been a member of ISCB since 2013 and will be a keynote speaker at the October 2014 meeting of ISCB-Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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Janet Kelso, PhD

Janet Kelso, PhD, is the leader of the Minerva research group for bioinformatics in the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. She received her Doctorate in bioinformatics from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Kelso's primary research focus is comparative primate genomics, and her team is currently participating in the Neanderthal, Bonobo, and Orangutan genome projects.

Kelso has been an ISCB member since 2004 and devoted her time and insight to the Society in many ways. She has been an ISCB Board member since 2005 and has served as ISMB Co-Chair '14, Secretary '06-'11,Vice President '11-'13, Conferences Chair '06-'12; Conferences Co-Chair '12, ISCB-Africa Co-Chair '11. Kelso will be giving a keynote talk at the 2014 ISCB-Latin America meeting.

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Kimmen Sjõlander, PhD

Kimmen Sjõlander, PhD is a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and is the head of the Berkeley Phylogenomics Group. Sjõlander earned a Doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to setting up her lab at Berkeley, Sjõlander worked in the biotechnology sector at Molecular Applications Group and Celera Genomics. Her research group at Berkeley works on computational structural biology and develops computational methods for diverse areas of analysis, including phylogenetic tree reconstruction, multiple sequence alignment, and protein structure prediction.

Sjõlander has been an ISCB member since 2002 and will be a keynote speaker at the 2014 ISCB-Latin America meeting.

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Tanya Berger-Wolf, PhD

Tanya Berger-Wolf, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Chicago, United States. Berger-Wolf earned a Doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has spent her career developing computational methods to address diverse questions in population biology that include movement of social animals, dynamic network analysis, and sibling relationship reconstruction.

Berger-Wolf has been an ISCB member since 2004 and was a keynote speaker at the May 2014 Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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Kristin Ardlie, PhD

Kristin Ardlie, PhD, is the Director of the Biological Samples Platform at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.  Ardlie earned her Doctorate at Princeton University in the United States. Prior to joining the Broad, Ardlie was a research scientist at the Whitehead Institute and was Vice President of Genetics at Genomics Collaborative, Inc. Ardlie's research has been focused on population genetics, and she is presently a co-principal investigator for the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, which is one of the largest human transcript sequencing projects to date.

Ardlie was a keynote speaker at the Next Generation Sequencing Conference (NGS) Conference held in June 2014 in Barcelona, Spain.

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Cornelia Van Duijn, PhD    

Cornelia Van Duijn, PhD, is a professor of genetic epidemiology at the Erasmus University Medical Center, Netherlands. She received a Doctorate in genetic epidemiology from Erasmus University and has pursued this area of research throughout her career. Van Duijn is a principle investigator of several large-scale population and family-based studies, and her research in genetic epidemiology has focused on complex disorders that include Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, frontal lobe dementia, diabetes, and hypertension. 

Van Duijn gave a keynote talk at the NGS Conference held in June 2014 in Barcelona, Spain.

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Michal Linial, PhD

Michal Linial, PhD, is the Director of The Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology, Department of Biological Chemistry, Institute of Life Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Linial earned her Doctorate in biochemistry from the Hebrew University. Linial's computational biology research interests include protein classification, functional genomics, and structural genomics. Linial also studies molecular and cellular aspects of neurobiology, with specific interests in exocytosis, the synapse, and neuron development.

Linial has been an ISCB member since 2002 and has served the Society in several ways. She has been a Board member since 2004, Vice President '09-'15, and Student Council Liaison '06-'08. Linial will be a keynote speaker at the 22^nd Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), ISCB's flagship meeting, which is being held in July 2014 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.

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Dana Pe'er, PhD

Dana Pe'er, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Systems Biology at Columbia University, New York, United States. Pe'er received her Doctorate in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Pe'er has developed novel computational approaches to study a wide range of biological questions. Her primary research focus presently is developing and using computational tools to investigate multidimensional single cell data so as to better understand cellular heterogeneity and characteristics of tumor cells.

Pe'er has been an ISCB member since 2014 and has served as co-chair of Late Breaking Research Committee for ISMB 2014. Pe'er is the winner of the 2014 ISCB Overton Prize, which honors the achievements of early- or mid-career computational biologists. In recognition of this award, Pe'er will be giving a keynote speech at the 2014 ISMB meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

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Deborah McGuinness, PhD

Deborah McGuinness, PhD, is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair and a professor of computer and cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, United States. She is also the founding director of RPI's Web Science Research Center.  McGuinness earned her Doctorate in computer science from Rutgers University. Her primary research areas include artificial intelligence, the semantic web, and descriptions logic.

McGuinness has been a member of ISCB since 2010 and was a keynote speaker at the ISCB-sponsored Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (CSHALS) in February 2014. 

These women scientists lead successful research programs in diverse areas of computational biology and bioinformatics, and they exemplify the innovative and diverse nature of these fields. ISCB service is a vital component of the work done by several of these women, and these voluntary commitments have been essential to the growth and success of ISCB as a professional society.

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Terry Gaasterland , PhD

Terry Gaasterland, PhD is a Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics at the University of California, San Diego and serves as Director of the Scripps Genome Center in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA. Gaasterland received her Doctorate
in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. Gaasterland's Laboratory of Computational Genomics develops and applies computational methods to understand how transcription and translation influence and modify the cell state through integrated analysis of genomic and proteomic data. Gaasterland is a founding member of the ISCB Executive Committee. She was a Co-Chair of ISMB 2012, has served on several other ISCB committees, and has represented ISCB as a FASEB advisor. Gaasterland will be an ISCB keynote speaker at the International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB) in Sydney, Australia on July 31st to August 2nd, 2014 and the ISCB-Latin America X-meeting with BSB and SoiBIo, in Belo Horizonte, in October 2014.