ISCB Newsletter 7-4

One of the ways that ISCB supports the growth of our science and helps to give back to our community is through travel fellowships. Students and post docs worldwide have benefited from the funds distributed by ISCB over the years, whether they were funds derived from membership dues, or funds the Society was able to secure through corporate sponsorships and granting agencies.

For last August’s ISMB/ECCB conference in Glasgow, Scotland, $89,000 USD and €25, 000 in funding assisted a total of 112 students and post docs to attend the conference. This was made possible through the generous funding of corporate sponsors E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., Hewlett Packard, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Pfizer Global Research & Development, as well as US funded grants from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, and a European Commission funded grant from the BioSapiens Network of Excellence.

We are pleased to share just a sampling of the many comments of appreciation and scientific development we received from this year’s fellowship recipients upon returning home from ISMB:

By receiving the notice that I had been awarded with the Travel Fellowship, I felt a great honour. However, I was not aware, at that time, of how great the ISMB conference would be or how significant it would be as a scientific forum. Indeed, the opportunity to attend ISMB/ECCB 2004 was unique and invaluable to me because it represented a stimulus for keeping my effort on learning and practicing bioinformatics, which is a challenging activity for a biology-only background researcher as me… It was an immense pleasure to be there and be able to interact with such talented researchers from all over the world, getting to know their ideas, their results and, most importantly, their approaches on developing and applying informatics tools to improve our knowledge of biological processes.

Diana Magalhaes Oliveira
Postdoc Fellow at the University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

Because of generous contributions by various funding agencies, I received an ISMB travel grant which enabled me to attend ISMB/ECCB 2004. I would like to extend my gratitude towards these agencies as well as ISCB, for making these funds available to students like myself… By presenting a poster on the HIV Genome Browser at ISMB, it was possible to get extremely useful input from the community about possible extensions and modifications of the browser. I was also able to share my knowledge and the difficulties I’ve been experiencing with scientists working on similar projects.
Anelda Boardman
University of Western Cape, SANBI
Bellville, South Africa

The project devoted to computational analysis of prolactin receptor signal transduction has been started in our laboratory of Endocrinology less than a year ago. And thus it was really important for me (as one of the active participants of this project) to show our preliminary results and to discuss them with the leader scientists in the field. These contacts which I had during the congress will allow us to continue and develop our project at a new level of skill... Unfortunately, because of the situation in Russia the only way to participate in this congress is to find any foreign support and thus the funds supported by ISCB’s sponsors offered the great opportunity for me to participate in this wonderful congress in Glasgow.
Roman L. Bogorad
Moscow state University
Moscow, Russia

In general, I was very impressed to see enormous amount of directions in bioinformatics, interesting projects and ideas. And the most significant educational experience of the conference was in sharing results of the research because it gives great input for continuation of research, you start to see some shortcuts in yours (and other's :-) results, get a lot of ideas. Personally, it was also very interesting to see a lot of famous scientist in bioinformatics which you knew before just by their names below an article title... In summary, this conference gave me a lot of stimuli for continuation of my research in the months and years ahead.
Vladimir Potapov
Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, ISRAEL

Having attended the conference for two consecutive years, I am amazed at how much progress is made in a year and how directions have rapidly shifted. Learning about these changes is exciting, motivating, and helpful in directing my short- and long-term research. In particular, I enjoyed the opportunity to exchange ideas with other scientists, sharing my research project as a poster, taking ideas back to my lab in Boston, and exploring potential post-graduate options… I graciously appreciate your support of the ISMB conference travel fellowships. Without your generosity, I would have most certainly missed the conference this year.
Sharyl L. Wong
Harvard Medical School
Boston, USA

. the material was well organized, well presented and pitched at just the right level for me. During the conference, I was able to meet researchers working on similar problems and make plans for future joint work. However, I find the most valuable experience was getting a glimpse of the "big picture" in computational biology. This is something one can lose sight of in day-to-day work, even in a world-class research institution like UCSF. The "birds-eye view" of the field comes from a combination of perspectives provided by keynote speakers, exposure to a very large number of papers and posters, and conversations with colleagues old and new.

Thank you so much for the fellowship!

Rachel Karchin, Ph.D
University of California
San Francisco, USA

We are pleased to announce that ISCB will be sponsoring 2005 travel fellowship funds from membership dues and contributions for the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) in Hawaii, the International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) in Cambridge, MA, and the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) in Madrid, Spain. Additionally, corporate support and agency grants will again assist dozens of students and post docs to attend the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Detroit. We hope you will consider making a personal or corporate donation to help build a strong fellowship fund for 2005 and beyond. You can contribute during your 2005 ISCB membership registration process, or contact us at admin@iscb.org for information on donation options if you are not a member, have already joined for 2005 and would like to donate retroactively, or are interested in corporate donation possibilities.