ISCB Announces Results of the 2016 Officer and Student Council Leadership Elections

The Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the results of the recent officer elections. Members of the society elected the following as incoming officers beginning January 2017:

President-Elect – Thomas Lengauer, Department of Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany. Thomas Lengauer, Ph.D. (Computer Science, Stanford University, 1979), Dr. rer. nat. (Mathematics, Free University of Berlin, 1976), is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Adjunct Professor at Saarland University and the University of Bonn. He is a founding member of ISCB and is currently serving as a member of the Board of Directors, in which he served in all years except 2002 to 2005, and of the Executive Committee where he currently serves as Vice President. Lengauer has chaired the ISCB Awards Committee from 2005 to 2007, where he assisted in the development of a revised selection process. He was also Scientific Chair of ISMB 1999 (Heidelberg) and 2007 (Vienna), as well as an Area Chair in several ISMB conferences. Lengauer is a Fellow of our Society. He will be President-Elect from January 2017 to January 2018 and will become President of the Society in January 2018, serving a three-year term. His research interests and activities include structural bioinformatics, molecular docking and computational chemistry, computational epigenetics and bioinformatics for disease, especially, viral resistance analysis.

Vice President – Janet Kelso, Bioinformatics Research Group Leader, Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. Janet Kelso, Ph.D. (Bioinformatics, University of the Western Cape, 2003), is a Bioinformatics Research Group Leader and Minerva Professor of Bioinformatics at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She is currently serving as a member of the ISCB Board of Directors (2005 - present), is the ISCB Conference Council Co-chair, has served on the ISMB Steering Committee since 2006, as well as an ISMB Conference Co-chair in 2014 and 2015. Kelso has played instrumental roles in the development of the ISCB conference series and served on the Executive Committee in both the position of Secretary (2006-2011) and Vice President (2011-2013). Kelso is a Fellow of our Society. She is also the Executive Co-editor for Bioinformatics, and serves on several other editorial boards. Kelso will serve her three-year term as Vice President starting in January 2017. Her research interests span questions in evolutionary and comparative genomics. She has participated in the development of methods for the analysis of ancient DNA and in the analysis of the genomes of archaic and early modern humans. Most recently her group has studied the functional implications of the admixture between humans and Neanderthals.


This year's election also included ISCB Student Council leadership. The ISCB Board of Directors is pleased to announce the elected young professionals who will lead the ISCB Student Council (SC) in 2017.

• Chair – Farzana Rahman, University of South Wales, United Kingdom
• Vice Chair – Nazeefa Fatima, University of Huddersfield, England, United Kingdom
• Treasurer – Aishwarya Alex Namasivayam, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
• Secretary - R. Gonzalo Parra, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Student Council Representative to ISCB Board of Directors - Dan DeBlasio, Carnegie Mellon University, United States

For additional information on ISCB's annual nominations and elections procedures please see www.iscb.org/iscb-leadership-a-staff-/officers-and-board-directors/nomination-election-procedures.

The next call for nominations of directors, officers and student council leaders will open February 2017, for terms beginning in January 2018.