2015 Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award: Larry Hunter |
2015 ISCB Award: Larry Hunter
2015 marks the inaugural recognition of an ISCB member with the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award for his or her outstanding service contributions toward the betterment of ISCB through exemplary leadership, education, and service. Larry Hunter is the first winner of this award for his instrumental role in the foundation of ISCB as a scientific society.
Hunter is a Professor and Director of the Center for Computational Biology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. His computational biology research interests include biomedical text mining and knowledge-based computational techniques for analysis of high-throughput data. Hunter began his career as a programmer at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), where he developed a database of researchers interested in artificial intelligence and molecular biology. He invited researchers from this database to a joint NLM-NSF meeting on artificial intelligence in molecular biology in 1992. This meeting developed into the Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology Meeting (ISMB). By 1996, ISMB had emerged as the premier meeting for computational biology research, and members of previous ISMB steering committees concluded that this unique interdisciplinary field needed its own professional society. This group of committee members created the International Society of Computational Biology and elected Larry Hunter as its first president. Hunter has gone on to serve ISCB in many other capacities and continues to be closely involved with ISCB.