ISCB Newsletter v.6.3

If you made it to ISCB’s annual conference, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2003), held June 29 – July 3 in Brisbane, Australia, I am sure you agree it was a resounding scientific success. Throughout the conference I heard positive comments on the quality of the talks, logistics, networking opportunities, and the choice of Brisbane for ISCB’s first conference in the Asia/Oceania region.

Deviating from our typical North American/European rotation enabled hundreds of participants from Australia, China, India, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and others to come for the first time.Although our North American and European attendance was lower than in previous years, as an organization serving the needs of a worldwide membership, it is important to bring attention to burgeoning science centers, and Brisbane provided an ideal setting for accomplishing this goal.

Of course, ISCB could not produce a conference of this quality or size without the dedicated help of our volunteer organizing committees. Therefore, I would like to thank the individuals and organizations listed below, and the many student volunteers, who worked to ensure that ISMB met the highest scientific, technical, and organizational standards.

The ISMB 2003 Organizing Committee was co-chaired by Gene Myers, University of California Berkeley, and Mark Ragan, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, and included Kevin Burrage, Advanced Computational Modelling Centre, The University of Queensland; Antoine Danchin, Institut Pasteur, Paris; Terry Gaasterland, The Rockefeller University; Minoru Kanehisa, Japanese Society for Bioinformatics, Kyoto University; Tim Littlejohn, Biolateral Pty Ltd.; John Mattick, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland; Christos Ouzounis, European Bioinformatics Institute; Shoba Ranganathan, Asia-Pacific BioNet and the National University of Singapore; David Wishart, University of Alberta.

The ISMB 2003 Local Organizing Committee was chaired by Mark Ragan and included Peter Adams, Tim Bailey, Jennifer Hallinan, Edith Hii, and Rohan Teasdale, all from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland, as well as Michelle Madden, Hotelier's International, a professional conference organizer contracted to help coordinate and execute conference logistics.

The ISMB 2003 Program Committee was chaired by Gene Myers and included Area Chairs Phil Bourne, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego (Databases); Terry Gaasterland (AC Gene Expression); Frederique Galisson, Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics/University of Lausanne (Protein Function & Evolution); David Gilbert, City University, London (AI & Linguistics); Michael Gribskov, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego (Alignments, Motifs, & HMMs); Gene Myers (Methods); Burkhard Rost, Columbia University (Protein Structure & Modelling); Alfonso Valencia, Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (Protein Interactions & Text Analysis); Ralph Zimmer, Institute for Informatics, University of Munich (Gene Networds & Applications); and Stan Letovsky, Boston University (Networks & Pathways).

And finally, significant financial support came from our primary sponsors named in the ISMB 2003 recap article within this newsletter, as well as from our exhibitors Accelrys, BioLateral, Biomax Informatics AG, Cambridge University Press, Chemical Computing Group, Inc., CRC Press, Genvea Biosciences, Protein Data Bank, Springer-Verlag, The Blueprint Initiative, The MIT Press, VPAC, Western Desert Aboriginal Paintings, and Wiley.