ISCB Congratulates the 2018 Class of Fellows

The ISCB Fellows program was created to honor members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. During the 2009 inaugural year of the program, the ISCB Board of Directors unanimously conferred Fellows status on the seven winners-to-date of the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award. Since 2010, ISCB has sought Fellows nominations from our members, with eligibility restrictions based on membership, and selection criteria focused most heavily on the significance of scientific contributions to our field and to ISCB. We were pleased to receive many excellent nominations this year, and the Fellows Selection Committee members carefully considered each one. Ultimately, eight nominees were elected as this year's newest Fellows.

	Patricia C. Babbitt, Univ. of California, San Francisco, for her pioneering contributions to our understanding of sequence-structure-function connections in enzymes, and to our ability to computationally annotate and predict those connections.
	Terry Gaasterland, University of California San Diego, for her service to ISCB since 1996 and her influence in the field of computational biology collecting and annotating pathways (originally through a tool called Magpie).
	Hanah Margalit, Hebrew University, as a research pioneer in the field, demonstrating excellence in teaching and research which led to many "firsts" in various subfields of bioinformatics, from structural biology to small-RNAs.
	Yves Moreau, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven R & D, as one of the top-most formative leaders in computational biology in Europe. Having a background in engineering, he has made important and a broad range of contributions to the analysis of microarray data, to disease gene prioritization and to the analysis of genomics variants in the context of rare genetic diseases.
	Bernard M.E. Moret, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, for mathematical theory and algorithms for comparative genomics and methods for understanding genome evolution, as well as his leadership in the computational biology research community.
	William Pearson, University of Virginia, in recognition for his development, distribution, and continuous improvements to FASTA and other similarity search methods, as well as his teaching of the biological and computational foundations of sequence analysis for more than 25 years.
	Mona Singh, Princeton University, for being one of the first to bring machine learning and sophisticated algorithmic techniques to computational biology and making seminal contributions to a large number of the most important and topical challenges in the field, from protein folding to protein-protein interactions to systems biology.
	Mike Steel, Canterbury University, Christchurch New Zealand, for outstanding contributions to mathematical and computational phylogenetics, and for service to the academic evolutionary biology research community.

 


These individuals will be recognized for their contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics at the Society’s annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Chicago, Illinois, July 6 – 10, 2018. They will receive a certificate and a pin as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.
 
The elected individuals will be part of the ISCB fellow class that increases now to 67 members (www.iscb.org/iscb-fellows).
 
The outcome of this year’s election is presented with great pride. “ISCB Fellows represent research and service excellence within the computational biology and bioinformatics community,” stated Thomas Lengauer, ISCB President. Each of these very accomplished researchers have made exceptional contributions to ISCB’s mission to advance the scientific understanding of living systems through computation.”
 
According to Bonnie Berger, 2018 ISCB Fellows Selection Committee, Chair, “the ISCB Fellows represent the full range of our field, from contributions that are fundamental to computation to those that reveal novel biology through computationally-minded analyses. We hope to continue to emphasize diversity of research, gender, and geography next year.”
 
Congratulations, 2018 Class of Fellows!