ISCB Announces 2022 Award Recipients
Ron Shamir, Núria López-Bigas, Po-Ru Loh, Reinhard Schneider |
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The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, Innovator Award, and Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award.
Ron Shamir, Tel Aviv University, is the winner of the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award. Núria López-Bigas, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, is the winner of the ISCB Innovator Award. Po-Ru Loh, Harvard Medical School/Broad Institute, is the Overton Prize winner. Reinhard Schneider, University of Luxembourg, has been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award.
Martin Vingron, ISCB Fellows, ISCB Awards Committee Chair remarked, “As chair of the Awards Selection Committee it gives me great pleasure to convey my heart-felt congratulations to this year’s awardees. Our community, as represented by the committee, admires these individuals’ outstanding achievements in research, training, and outreach.”
Dr. Shamir, Dr. Lopez-Bigas, and Dr. Loh will present distinguished keynote presentations at the upcoming ISMB 2022 in Madison, WI, USA, July 10 – 14. Dr. Schneider will be recognized at the conference prior to a distinguished keynote presentation. Mark your calendars and join us for ISMB 2022!
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Professor Ron Shamir, PhD
Blavatnik School of Computer Science
Tel Aviv University, Israel
Recipient of ISCB Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award |
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The Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award recognizes a member of the computational biology community who is more than two decades post-degree and has made major contributions to the field of computational biology. Ron Shamir is being honored as the 2022 recipient of this award.••
Ron Shamir is a professor of Computer Science, and Founder and Head of the Safra Center for Bioinformatics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Prof. Shamir’s group develops algorithms and tools for analysis of genomic and systems biology data.
Ron Shamir made numerous ground breaking contributions to modern bioinformatics. Coming from theoretical computer science, his early contribution to biological applications concerned the problem of physical mapping. This was one of the pressing questions in the context of the sequencing of the human genome. He carried over insights from the study of interval graphs to DNA sequences and developed one of the first programs for large scale physical mapping. This work was done at a time, when bioinformatics as a field was still in an early stage and Ron Shamir through these contributions helped define the field and its methodology.
Over the years, Ron Shamir contributed landmark papers to many fields in computational biology. With his group he developed highly influential clustering and biclustering algorithms, the CLIQUE and SAMBA algorithms. Further work on gene expression analysis and networks has later been built on top of this, yielding, among others, the EXPANDER program. The prevalence of modularity in molecular biology, leading to the search for clusters in graphs, has been widely recognized in the last two decades. The accumulation of large-scale interaction data, such as protein-protein interaction networks, requires novel computational techniques that enable dissection of the high-dimensional genomic data. Although many bioinformatics approaches have been developed for dissection of network and similarity data separately, algorithms for joint analysis of both types of information were pioneered by Shamir’s group. Prof. Shamir proposed one of the first approaches to discovery of functional modules by identifying connected networks in the interaction data that exhibit high internal similarity. By imposing network topology constraints on clusters of gene expression data, he was able to detect weaker signals that evaded all other methods. Employing the methods he developed, Ron Shamir has pursued numerous collaborations with long-standing biological partners of his, producing many noteworthy results, e.g. on DNA repair mechanisms and on chromatin modifying enzymes.
Ron Shamir is known by many as a founding father of Israeli bioinformatics - he is the key person responsible for positioning Israeli bioinformatics among the top bioinformatics research schools. Shamir also contributed significantly to education in bioinformatics. He developed and taught one of the first courses in computational biology. Many colleagues have meanwhile profited from this material, which has become a de facto standard in bioinformatics teaching. Furthermore, many of Shamir’s graduate students are now themselves professors or group leaders, e.g., at the Weizmann Institute. Ron Shamir has also been highly active in the international bioinformatics community, in particular on the steering committee of the RECOMB conference and its satellite meetings. In the spring semester 2016, he organized a special semester at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley focussed on “Algorithmic Challenges in Genomics”, which attracted a large number of high-calibre researchers and many students.
Dr. Shamir is a researcher of extraordinary talent and breadth, influencer in bioinformatics, and a servant to the community. It is with great pleasure for ISCB to award him with this prestigious award. |
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Núria López-Bigas, PhD
Group Leader (ICREA Research Professor), Biomedical Genomics Group, Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, Spain
Recipient of ISCB Innovator Award |
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The year 2016 marked the launch of the ISCB Innovator Award, which is given to a leading scientist who is within two decades of receiving the PhD degree, has consistently made outstanding contributions to the field, and continues to forge new directions. Núria López-Bigas is the 2022 recipient of the ISCB Innovator Award.
Nuria Lopez•-Bigas is a biologist with a PhD in molecular genetics of deafness. She transitioned into bioinformatics during her postdoc at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). Since 2006, she leads a research group in Barcelona focused on the study of cancer from a genomics perspective.
Lopez-Bigas is a leading innovator in computational cancer biology. Her group has extensively characterized the mutational profiles of cancer cells as well as studying the underlying mutational processes that lead to cancer. Her thorough, careful, and innovative approaches have been instrumental in understanding the effects of chemotherapeutic on cancer and optimizing treatments. Lopez-Bigas’s research scope spans all the way from understanding the biochemical basis of mutation signatures, through to the clinical application where she is active in developing tools to support translational interpretation for clinical application.
Dr. Lopez-Bigas’s research analyses have detailed the different mutational processes affecting different cells and tissues, and the role of the DNA repair pathways in fixing DNA damage and mismatches. Her group has also examined how chromatin conformation, the presence of nucleosomes and DNA structure modify DNA damage and repair thereby shaping the rate at which mutations are accumulated in genomes.
Aside from research discoveries, Lopez-Bigas’s group has been at the forefront of developing software and data infrastructure for cancer research. She and her group have used their IntOGen pipeline to build a compendium of mutational cancer driver genes together with information about the mechanisms by which they contribute to tumorigenesis. They have also developed the Cancer Genome Interpreter tool which addresses the need to assess the biological and clinical importance of mutations detected in a tumor sample.
ISCB is honored to confer the 2022 Innovator Award to Nuria Lopez-Bigas. |
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Po-Ru Loh, PhD
Assistant Professor, Division of Genetics and Center for Data Sciences, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School; Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA
Recipient of the ISCB Overton Prize |
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The Overton Prize recognizes the research, education, and service accomplishments of early to mid-career scientists who are emerging leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics. The Overton Prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of G. Christian Overton, a leading bioinformatics researcher and a founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors. Po-Ru Loh is being recognized as the 2022 recipient of the Overton Prize.
Dr. Po-Ru Loh, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School, has pioneered the development of ultra-efficient algorithms in medical and population genetics, ushering in the era of biobank-scale genomics with two of the most widely-used statistical genetics tools in the past decade, Eagle2 and Bolt-LMM. His tools have powered the analysis of millions of genomes, revealing thousands of loci underlying human health and disease.
A hallmark of his work is that he has consistently devised sophisticated algorithms and statistics to solve the most pressing issues in computational genomics and provided highly-utilized software tools that implement these methods. He is well-known for his research contribution in the areas of haplotype phasing and imputation, linear mixed model methods for genome-wide association studies, medical and population genetics, genome mosaicism, and compressive genomics.
Loh’s innovations, contributions and ongoing potential at bringing sophisticated statistical techniques to transform computational genetics labels him one of the top computational genomics researchers of his generation. It is with great pleasure ISCB bestow this Overton Prize to Po-Ru Loh. |
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Prof. Reinhard Schneider, PhD
Professor, Chief Scientist, Bioinformatics, Head of Bioinformatics Core Facility, Université du Luxembourg
Recipient of the ISCB Outstanding Contributions Award |
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The Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award recognizes an ISCB member for outstanding service contributions toward the betterment of ISCB through exemplary leadership, education, and service. The 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award is Reinhard Schneider.
Reinhard Schneider is a Full Professor in Bioinformatics, and Head of Bioinformatics Core Facility and Head of ELIXIR Luxembourg Node at the University of Luxembourg. His research interests focus on the development of new bioinformatics algorithms in structure and function prediction of proteins. He is involved in various national and European projects in the areas of large data and knowledge management, high performance computing, data sustainability, disease mechanisms, and data integration across disciplines including medicine and patient data.
Throughout his career, Schneider has served ISCB in numerous positions, including, Member of the Board of Directors (2005 – 2020), ISCB Treasurer (2009 - 2016), and Vice-President (2005 - 2009). He also served as Head of Finance and Business Development Committee, and Head of Governance Committee. He co-organized ISMB 1999 in Heidelberg and he also served as Scientific Organizing Committee Member, Highlights Track Area Chair, or Steering Committee Member for many of the ISMB and ISMB/ECCB conferences in the years since. In addition to committee service for ISMB, he also was involved in co-organizing several international ISCB Affiliated meetings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These meetings included ISCB Africa (2010: Bamako, Mali; 2011: Cape Town, South Africa) in cooperation with the African Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (ASBCB), ISCB Latin America (2010: Montevideo, Uruguay; 2014: Belo Horizonte, Brazil), and ISCB Asia (2011: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; 2012: Shen Zhen, China; 2013: Seoul, South Korea).
ISCB profited greatly from the management experience which Reinhard Schneider had gained through his involvement in several startups. His gift for people management, working with lawyers and a wide range of finance people helped reshaping the Society. Together with a web developer, he redesigned the ISCB web-portal, that helped the members to easily navigate the necessary information and this web presence is well maintained till today. He introduced multi-year membership and other benefits to the members that attracted a lot of new members and boosted the memberships and revenues. In addition, during his time as treasurer, ISCB started to invest in funds that showed to give the Society greater financial security.
To further his contributions to the foundations of ISCB, Schneider was instrumental in the establishment of the ISCB Student Council (ISCB SC), a platform for students and trainees to become involved with ISCB. He played an important role of mentor/advocate for and support of the ISCBSC and also strongly supported ISCBSC’s Internship Initiative to help students from underprivileged countries by offering internships in his lab.
Reinhard Schneider is being recognized for his significant foundational contributions to both ISCB and the broad bioinformatics communities. ISCB is honored to confer the 2022 Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award to Reinhard. |
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