ISCB Welcomes Two New Board Members; Bids Farewell To Seven

As the terms of ten ISCB board members come to an end, three have been re-elected and two new members will be welcomed to the board of directors this month. During the ISCB annual board of directors meeting in Brisbane, Australia last June, board members considered 15 well qualified candidates to fill just five of the upcoming vacancies to be left by departing board members. Directors Dietlind Gerloff (UK), Larry Hunter (USA) and Hershel Safer (Israel) were re-elected, and Michal Linial (Israel) and Satoru Miyano (Japan) have been elected to first-time terms. All will serve three years on the board beginning January 21, 2004.

ISCB President, Michael Gribskov, enthused, “I am thrilled with the results of these board elections. We are achieving both gender and geographic diversity, which is important if we hope to effectively represent and expand our membership.” Toni Kazic, Nominations Committee Chair for the past three years, added, “We received over 30 excellent nominations for just five openings. Among those, 15 accepted their nominations and became official candidates. I am so happy to see this level of interest among both established and emerging leaders of our field.”

Please join us in welcoming our newest board members:

Satoru Miyano, Ph.D. is a professor of Human Genome Center, Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo. His research interests include gene networks, microarray gene expression analysis, pathway modeling and simulation, and computational knowledge discovery. Currently, he is focusing on computational approaches for systems biology. Miyano has been organizing the International Conference on Genome Informatics (giw.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp) since 1996 and he is the President of Japanese Society for Bioinformatics (www.jsbi.org) for April 2003 - March 2004. More about his researh group may be found at bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp.

Michal Linial, Ph.D.
is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. She is the director of the Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology and a member of the Otto Lewie Center for Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology. Since 1999 she has been the head of the first joint B.Sc.-M.Sc. program for Computer Science and Computational Biology in Israel. Her research interests range from investigating the molecular basis of the mechanism controlling the secretory machinery to the genetic program underlying neuronal differentiation and to proteomics approach to study protein interaction in neuronal systems. On the computational facet, her research focuses on global approaches to study the protein space towards structural and functional genomics. She is responsible for open source servers such as ProtoNet (www.protonet.cs.huji.ac.il) and PANDORA (www.pandora.cs.huji.ac.il) that classify and organize all proteins according to their sequences and annotations, respectively. As part of Structural Genomics target selection, ProTarget server (www.protarget.cs.huji.ac.il) was initiated to provide a prediction for any protein according to the chance of belonging to a new superfamily. More about her research and academic activities may be found at www.ls.huji.ac.il/~michall/.

Two of the founding members of the ISCB board will conclude nearly seven years of dedicated service to ISCB, having helped in the formation of the Society as an international body working toward advancing the science of computational biology.

Terry Gaasterland, Ph.D.
Rockefeller University

David States, MD., Ph.D.
University of Michigan

Five other members have served on the ISCB Board of Directors since 2000, who, together with the founding board members above, will end their service on January 21, 2004:

Minoru Kanehisa, Ph.D.
Kyoto University

Donna Slonim, Ph.D.
MIT Genetics Institute

Gary Stormo, Ph.D.
Washington University, St. Louis

Masaru Tomita, Ph.D.
Keio University

Cathy Wu
Georgetown University

ISCB would like to acknowledge the efforts of each of these outgoing board members, and thank them for their many years of excellent service to the Society.