2017 Overton Prize Winner: Christoph Bock

2017 ISCB Overton Prize: Christoph Bock

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) each year recognizes the achievements of an early to mid-career scientist with the Overton Prize. This prize honors the untimely death of Dr. G. Christian Overton, an admired computational biologist and founding ISCB Board member. Winners of the Overton Prize are independent investigators who are in the early to middle phases of their careers and are selected because of their significant contributions to computational biology through research, teaching, and service.

ISCB is pleased to recognize Dr. Christoph Bock, Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria as the 2017 winner of the Overton Prize. Bock will be presenting a keynote presentation at the 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology/ European Conference on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB) in Prague, Czech Republic being held during July 21-25, 2017.

AT HOME IN THE EPIGENOME

Christoph Bock’s scientific curiosity was nurtured from a young age. His parents were math and science teachers, and while they did not push him to pursue these areas of study, he sees how this intellectually stimulating environment cultivated his natural curiosity and provided a critical foundation to his career as a scientist.  Bock started exploring computer programming from the age of twelve, and he realizes in retrospect how learning to code was a valuable tool for practicing problem solving and scientific thinking.

During high school, Bock specialized in physics and math.  His undergraduate studies at the University of Mannheim focused on computer science and business information systems, emphasizing machine learning and artificial intelligence.  Toward the end of his studies, Bock yearned to tackle questions with broader relevance than the “toy problems” he encountered in his course work.  Bock recalled, “Human biology seemed the biggest challenge and also most societally relevant. I was lucky that Jürgen Hesser offered a bioinformatics lecture and agreed to supervise my Master’s thesis at the University of Mannheim”. His Master’s research work focused on protein structure prediction and homology modeling.

Bock pursued his PhD studies in bioinformatics under the supervision of Thomas Lengauer at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, studying epigenetic regulation of the genome. “Moving into bioinformatics and epigenetics, I had to catch up on a lot of important biological knowledge”, Bock recalled. “Reading papers and collaborating was key, but it also helped that my research focused on a field that was quite young, with ample opportunity to try out something new.”

He attributes much of his bioinformatics training to the time spent in the research group of Thomas Lengauer, and he has been grateful for his mentor’s continued support and collaboration throughout his early career. Bock also acknowledges the important guidance and feedback on his research provided by Jörn Walter, who co-supervised his PhD dissertation and introduced Bock to the international epigenetics community.

Bock’s first encounter with epigenetics data transformed his scientific career path, and he has been one of the first bioinformaticians that dedicated their work to epigenetic data. “When I started my PhD studies in 2004, the largest epigenetic dataset consisted of just over 100 data points, and one of my first papers established epigenome prediction as a means of inferring what was still very difficult and costly to measure experimentally.”

In the following years, next generation sequencing transformed the field, and it became possible to collect several billion data points in a single epigenome mapping experiment. This development created a strong demand for bioinformatic methods. “Working at the forefront of the epigenome revolution has been the highlight of my scientific research so far. But the most exciting times may still be ahead as epigenome research is starting to become broadly relevant for medicine, and I am looking forward to contributing to this development.”

Bock developed several software tools as part of his PhD, including BiQ Analyzer for processing DNA methylation data and EpiGRAPH for analyzing and predicting epigenome profiles in their genomic context.  Bock went on to pursue postdoctoral studies under Alexander Meissner at the Broad Institute.  There, Bock was exposed to the world of wet-lab biology, and he discovered the thrill and power of jointly developing new laboratory techniques and computational methods, which he used to study the epigenome of pluripotent and hematopoietic stem cells.

In 2012, Bock started his own research group at CeMM, an institute dedicated to advancing precision medicine through basic and translational research.  He was hired by Giulio Superti-Furga, Scientific Director of CeMM, who, as Bock said, “Provided ample encouragement and let me try things that were initially quite far outside of my comfort zone, such as starting a wet lab and leading a next generation sequencing technology platform.” Bock has thrived at CeMM, where he has been able to work with many passionate researchers within the institute and at the neighboring Medical University of Vienna.

At CeMM, Bock has also developed his personal style of being a PI and mentor, acting as a catalyst of ideas and projects for an interdisciplinary team.  He explained, “Our lab combines computational and wet-lab biology on roughly equal terms, with a good dose of technology development – including single-cell sequencing, CRISPR, epigenome editing, machine learning, and more.  There is also an extensive network of collaborations, ranging from fundamental biology to immediate clinical applications in the area of personalized and precision medicine. It is a great privilege to work with such an interdisciplinary and creative group of smart people.”

Bock considers the success of his students and postdocs as a key measure of his achievement as a PI. He explained, “I work hard to maintain an environment in which every group member can build a great CV and learns what he or she needs to advance in their scientific career.  So far, we have a 100% success rate of postdocs moving on to attractive PI jobs, which is great for young lab.  But it is clear that helping others succeed in their career is not an easy task, and you need to create room for success and failure, and a safety net that encourages risk taking.”

Bock is still excited about epigenetics and what it can teach us about a cell’s past, present and future.  He hopes that epigenomic data can be used to understand the regulatory logic of cells and to determine what goes awry in diseases like cancer. Bock said, “We are pursuing an engineering-inspired “build it to understand it” approach to cancer biology, where we combine CRISPR epigenome editing and computationally designed drug combinations to rationally reprogram normal cells into cancer  cells and vice versa.  Building upon a breakthrough technology for pooled CRISPR screening with single-cell sequencing, We seek to decipher complex biological pathways and gene regulatory networks in high throughput, in order to overcome the classical “one gene, one postdoc” paradigm of functional (epi-) genomics.”

Bock is deeply gratified to be honored with the Overton Prize, especially since he will receive his award this year in Prague.  He said, “Ten years ago, I attended ISMB 2007 in Vienna – one of the first conferences where I presented my PhD project on epigenome prediction.  That year, Eran Segal won the Overton Prize, and his keynote lecture about DNA’s regulatory code reinforced my interest in understanding the role of epigenome regulation in biology and medicine.  ISMB 2007 was also my first time in Vienna, and the great impressions from that visit surely contributed to the fact that a job ad from Vienna caught my attention a few years later.  This year, it will be my pleasure to give the Overton Prize lecture at ISMB 2017 in Prague, ten years and just a few hundred kilometers away from a truly career-defining ISMB 2007.”

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2017 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award Pavel Pevzner

2017 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award: Pavel Pevzner

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) recognizes an established scientist each year with the Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award for significant contributions he or she has made to the field.  This award honors scientists who have contributed to the advancement of computational biology and bioinformatics through their research, service, and education work. Pavel Pevzner, PhD, Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science and Director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry at University of California, San Diego, has been selected as the winner of the 2017 Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award.

The ISCB awards committee, chaired by Dr. Bonnie Berger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, selected Pevzner as the 2017 winner.
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PAVEL PEVZNER: IN SEARCH OF LIFE’S PERFECT PUZZLES

Pevzner was born in Kursk, Russia, and spent his childhood in the city of Murom, which was a hub of the Soviet electronics industry.  His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was a teacher, but he admits that his early education got off to a rocky start. He described himself as a poor student who was more interested in having fun, but around age 10, he grew more interested in books.¹  Pevzner’s interest and abilities in mathematics were soon recognized, and at age 14 he was sent to the Boarding High School at Moscow State University, founded by world-renowned mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, for children gifted in math and physics. In spite of Pevzner’s rigorous high school math studies, he had difficulty getting into Moscow State University because of the anti-semitic admission policies aimed at ethnic Jews.²

As an undergraduate, Pevzner studied at the Russian Institute of Railway Engineers, which was known for its applied mathematics program.  He did well throughout his course of study and published a number of papers on discrete mathematics as an undergraduate.  In 1985, he joined a bioinformatics lab at Institute of Genetics of Microorganisms VNIIGENETIKA, and received his Ph.D. in Mathematics and Physics in 1988 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Pevzner was completing his graduate work during the era of “Perestroika” and “Glastnost,” and for the first time in decades, scientists were being granted permission to travel abroad and were even told that the government would pay for their travels.  Pevzner jumped on this opportunity and notified the Russian government that he wanted to work with Mike Waterman at the University of Southern California (USC), a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics and 2006 ISCB Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award winner. In 1989, Pevzner reached out to Waterman personally, not quite trusting that his request to the government would be enough to facilitate his travels (it was never granted). During their correspondence, Waterman sent him an open problem, which Pevzner ended up solving.  Waterman was surprised that someone had solved this problem and eventually invited him to pursue postdoctoral work in his lab.  Pevzner spent two years as a postdoc with Waterman at USC.

In 1992, Pevzner established himself as an independent researcher and started his lab in the Department of Computer Science at Pennsylvania State University.  Three years later he returned to USC as a professor in the Department of Mathematics. In 2000, he moved to San Diego and was named Ronald R. Taylor Chair Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).  In 2006, he was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.

Pevzner’s research interests span the field of bioinformatics and his work has been guided by applying algorithmic ideas to bioinformatics problems. Pevzner has made significant contributions to a wide array of subfields, including genome assembly, understanding how genome rearrangements influence evolution, and developing new algorithms for sequencing antibodies and antibiotics using mass spectrometry. He continues to be fascinated and amazed by scientific discovery, and he explained, “The most surprising thing for me was a realization that dominant biological theory often falls apart when new data and new methods to analyze them become available.  Three times in my career I had to refute the biological theories that I worked on: the Master Alu theory of repeat evolution, the NME theory that connects the N-terminal Methionine Excision and protein half-lives, and the Random Breakage Theory of chromosome evolution.”

In this era of abundant genome data, Pevzner is currently interested in reconstructing the detailed evolution of the human genome, down to each new repeat and rearrangement that affected the genome, by using hundreds of primate genomes that will be sequenced in the near future.  In a more practical domain, Pevzner’s other goal is to develop a computational approach to antibiotics discovery, a problem of great importance due to emerging antibiotics resistance. He describes antibiotics discovery as one of the last bastions of modern biology that remains barely touched by bioinformatics.

Beyond Pevzner’s academic contributions, he has served the computational biology community in many ways.  Seventeen years ago, he helped launch RECOMB (Conference in Research in Computational Molecular Biology) together with Waterman and Sorin Istrail.  He has served as a member of numerous editorial boards in the fields of computational biology and computer science.

Throughout his career, Pevzner has mentored many students; 22 of his former graduate and postdoctoral trainees are now professors at various universities.  He has seen significant changes to the way he teaches his undergraduate courses along the way. He explained, “The way I teach my undergraduates has completely changed:  I haven’t given a traditional classroom lecture in three year now.  I feel that traditional 1000-year old educational technology (classroom lecture) is coming to its end and will soon be substituted by more efficient “Intelligent Tutoring Systems.”  My goal in recent years was to develop the first such system for bioinformatics that will be launched in Spring 2017 on edX.”

Pevzner is humbled by his selection as the winner of the 2017 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award – he acknowledges that he did not earn this recognition alone.  He said, “This award really goes to my teachers and my students and postdocs over the last quarter of a century.”

1 www.scientific-computing.com/feature/life-puzzle-solver
2 www.npr.org/2014/03/28/295789948/the-real-problem

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THE 2021 ART IN SCIENCE COMPETITION

Submit Art Work

Find the beauty of science through art!

ISCB members attending the ISMB/ECCB 2021 are encouraged to showcase the artistic side of science by submitting to The Art in Science Competition!

Judges making up a select committee of each level of the ISCB membership will evaluate
for the following:

• Scientific significance to the field of bioinformatics
• Overall impression of the art / visual impact of the image
• Originality

*all submitters will be notified via email in July with the results.

The accepted works will be displayed ISMB/ECCB 2021.

The winning image will be announced during the virtual ISCB Town Hall and presented with a $200 USD prize, as well as be the feature cover image for the ISCB Fall Newsletter.

Submit your artwork today!

Deadline to Submit: June 15, 2021

Disassembled Tessellation	Mondrian‘s Sum of Squares	dEYEversity
In Silico Brainbow	ImpactFactor

Previous Image Contest Winners

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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.

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ISCB Innovator Award

The ISCB Innovator Award is given to a leading scientist, 10-20 years post-degree (or equivalent experience), who consistently makes outstanding contributions to the field of computational biology and continues to forge new directions.

ISCB recognizes that career paths may take many forms and that the definition of “early/mid-career” is fluid; supports researchers taking time off for maternity/paternity, care for a family member, an event of personal disability or other factors. A nominee may qualify for the Innovator Award even though their actual years since degree is above the set threshold. It is the responsibility of the nominator to indicate any time-off taken by the nominee when submitting the nomination form. ISCB may deduct the equivalent time for the maternity/paternity leave, care for a family member or personal disability from the set award thresholds using guidance established by the European Research Council (page 19, paragraph 5).

2025 ISCB Innovator Award: Fabian Theis

2015 Overton Prize Winner: Curtis Huttenhower

2015 ISCB Overton Prize: Curtis Huttenhower

The Overton Prize recognizes early or mid-career scientists who are emerging leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics for their accomplishments in research, education, and service. The Overton Prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of G. Christian Overton, a leading bioinformatics researcherand founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors. Curtis Huttenhower is this year’s winner of the Overton Prize for his groundbreaking research on microbial communities, with a focus on the human microbiome.

Huttenhower is an Associate Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has worked on developing novel computational tools to analyze the large, complex datasets associated with microbial communities and NIH Human Microbiome Project. Huttenhower’s research has provided new insights into how microbial communities impact human health and disease. His research potential has been recognized through the receipt of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and an NSF CAREER Award.

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2015 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award: Cyrus Chothia

2015 ISCB ACCOMPLISHMENT BY A
SENIOR SCIENTIST AWARD: CYRUS CHOTHIA

The ISCB Senior Scientist Accomplishment Award recognizes leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics for their significant contributions to these fields through research, education, and service.

Cyrus Chothia was selected as the 2015 recipient for his groundbreaking work using computation to understand protein structure and function and the evolution of genomes. Chothia is well known for using computation to study protein structure, and his early work showed that relatively simple principles govern the structure of proteins, regardless of the structural complexity. His research has been critical to understanding and classifying proteins based on structural folds, and he has shown that changes to a protein sequence can be accommodated by structural shifts. More recently, Chothia developed computational approaches based on his knowledge of protein structure to understand how gene duplication and recombination between particular domains drives genome evolution. Chothia’s illustrious career includes election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2000. He has mentored numerous students and postdoctoral fellows, and many are now rising leaders in their respective fields. Chothia’s work throughout his career has been instrumental to the birth of the fields of structural bioinformatics and computational genomics.

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Picture: 2014 Overton Prize Winner, Dana Pe'er

2014 ISCB Overton Prize: Dana Pe'er

By Christiana N. Fogg¹, Diane E. Kovats²*

¹ Freelance Science Writer, Kensington, Maryland, United States of America,
² Executive Director, International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, California, United States of America

* E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

ISCB honors the achievements of an early- or mid-career scientist with the Overton Prize each year. The Overton Prize was established in memory of Dr. G. Christian Overton, a respected computational biologist and founding ISCB Board member who died unexpectedly in 2000. Winners of the Overton Prize are independent scientists in the early or middle phases of their careers that are recognized for their significant contributions to computational biology through research, teaching, and service.

ISCB is thrilled to recognize Dr. Dana Pe’er, Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Systems Biology at Columbia University in New York, NY, as the 2014 winner of the Overton Prize. In recognition of this award, Dr. Pe’er will be a keynote speaker at this year’s Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference in Boston, Massachusetts and will present a talk titled “A Multidimensional Single Cell Approach to Understand Cellular Behavior” on Monday, July 14, 2014.

Dana Pe’er: From Mathematics to Mass Cytometry

Dana Pe’er encountered her first love in second grade. Her father was eager to instill a passion for learning in her, and one day he showed her the proof demonstrating why the same number of natural numbers and rational numbers exist whereas the number of irrational numbers is greater than the number of rational numbers. Pe’er recalled, “Grappling with different strengths of infinity and the elegance mathematical logic made me fall in love with math.”

Pe’er received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in computer science, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She did her Ph.D. research in the lab of Dr. Nir Friedman, where she had the realization that “statistical machine learning is a very powerful “math” to help elucidate biology, and the complexity of it all required computer science.” She recalls gaining several insights during this period that have accompanied her throughout her career, including her affirmation that, “Good modeling of the biology is the most important ingredient toward a good computational method for biological discovery. Rather than applying the most sophisticated “nuclear powered” method to squeeze the most out of the data statistically, one can use biological insight to limit the space of possible models more than any statistical method ever can.”

Making the right assumptions requires a good understanding of biology, knowledge Pe’er gained through her collaboration with Dr. Aviv Regev. They met as graduate students in Israel, where Regev greatly influenced how Pe’er thought of biological questions. Pe’er recalled, “She was my first real biology teacher and she taught me to think about biology more abstractly, rather than stick to more rigid and dogmatic thinking.”

Pe’er did her postdoctoral work with Dr. George Church at Harvard University, where she began navigating the messy world of experimental biology. Church’s mentorship gave Pe’er a new perspective of science, and she moved away from asking, “What type of computation can I do for this data?” and learned to ask instead, “What data do I need to answer a biological question I am passionate about?”

Pe’er describes the mentorship she received from Dr. Daphne Koller as being instrumental to her success as a trainee. Koller provided guidance and mentoring to Pe’er during her Ph.D. and postdoctoral training and instilled in her the importance of “good modeling assumptions.” Although Pe’er was not an official student of Koller’s, she recalls appreciatively the valuable career advice and insights Koller shared with her as she launched into her career as an independent researcher.

In 2006, Pe’er started her own lab at Columbia University in the Department of Biological Sciences and Systems Biology. Her lab embodies the interdisciplinary nature of her research and is filled with trainees from a wide range of backgrounds. She genuinely appreciates working with her trainees and has enjoyed “Watching them grow,and seeing how much they matured as scientists. I really love mentorship and feel a form of motherhood towards my trainees.”

Pe’er has developed several research projects that use large, complex data sets to examine how molecular networks respond to various external stimuli. One of her primary interests is using single cell technologies such as mass cytometry to better understand cellular heterogeneity. She is fascinated by this work and hopes “to reframe development not as a set of discrete cell types, but rather as a continuum, a dynamic process in which one can place each individual cell along a developmental trajectory that represents not only cell types, but their many cellular heterogeneity to cancer and the improvement of personalized cancer therapy.

Pe’er’s training in computer science and biology have given her a unique combination of skills and knowledge that have served her well as a computational biologist, but she sees her training experience becoming mandatory for future biology researchers. As she sees it, “Biology has become an information science. Enabled by an increasing number of technologies, the magnitude and complexity of the data is only increasing. In the future, computation will be an integral part of biology, like molecular biology is today.” Pe’er champions the power of doing science at the interface of biology and computation. “My “bilingual” training really lets me play at the interface,” she acknowledges. “It lets me communicate with both sides effectively and make connections. By understanding what powerful computation can do, I can design experiments and strive for technologies that might not be intuitive and obvious to a bench biologist that is less versed in computation. Designing the right data-rich experiment, matched with the right biology is truly empowering.”

Pe’er serves on the editorial board of the journal Cell, and she considers this role as a valuable opportunity to serve the scientific community. Cell has acknowledged computational biology as a critical rising field, and Pe’er sees her work on the advisory board as an important way to serve the computational biology community and help educate the journal about the field.

Outside of the lab, Pe’er has taken time to support and promote K12 science education by organizing a science expo. She was inspired to do this when she realized that her young daughter didn’t really know what she did. Pe’er recalled that her daughter “thought my job was ‘writing emails all day’. She did not realize that scientists are trying to figure out what we don’t know, rather than rehash what we do.” The expo was designed to transform a school into “a multi-story, hands-on, interactive science museum. Each volunteer scientist brings their lab and science to the kids, distilled in a way that is both engaging and clear to the kids.” She acknowledged that the expo presents a big but gratifying challenge to the volunteer scientists because they had to take “complex science and distill it in a way that can relate to a 5 year old. But, if you can explain your science to a 5 year old, you can explain it to anyone.”

Dr. Alfonso Valencia, chair of the ISCB Awards Committee, sees Pe’er’s selection as fitting recognition of her scientific contributions. He said, “I was very happy to see that Dana Pe'er was finally selected for the award. This is always a very difficult decision given the number of excellent young computational biologists in our community. Dana has published amazing papers with substantial impact in biology and cancer biology, together with other papers on method development that were very influential, some of them presented in ISMB.” Dr. Bonnie Berger, co-chair of the Awards Committee, also sees Pe’er as a rising luminary in the field of computational biology “for pioneering the use of Bayesian networks in cellular network inference.”

Pe’er is looking forward to where her research will take her, especially her ongoing work on single cell data. She is also enjoying and appreciating this moment of recognition. Pe’er was excited and uplifted when she was told she had been selected for the 2014 Overton Prize, and she recounted, “I got such an outpouring of congratulations from my colleagues, which was really the best."

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2014 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award: Gene Myers

2014 ISCB ACCOMPLISHMENT BY A
SENIOR SCIENTIST AWARD: GENE MYERS

By Christiana N. Fogg¹, Diane E. Kovats²*

¹ Freelance Science Writer, Kensington, Maryland, United States of America,
² Executive Director, International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, California,
United States of America

* E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB; www.iscb.org) annually recognizes a senior
scientist for his or her outstanding achievements. The ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award honors a leader in the field of computational biology for his or her significant contributions to the community through research, service, and education. Dr. Eugene “Gene” Myers of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden has been selected as the 2014 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award winner.

Myers was selected by the ISCB's awards committee, which is chaired by Dr. Bonnie Berger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Myers will receive his award and deliver a keynote address at ISCB's 22nd Annual Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting. This meeting is being held in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 11–15, 2014, at the John B. Hynes Memorial Convention Center (www.iscb.org/ismb2014).

Gene Myers: Coding and Decoding

Myers was captivated by computer programming as a young student. He remembered his fascination being stoked by a realization and recalls, “A computer is a programmable device, and once programmed, is a specific device for doing something that I conceived of. I found this magical.” He completed a BS in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, but his interest in biology came during his PhD studies at the University of Colorado in the late 1970s. Myers recounted that he initially considered molecular
biology as “a source of interesting computational questions.” He was studying computer science under the guidance of his dissertation advisor, Andrzej Ehrenfeucht, who had eclectic interests that included molecular biology. Myers, along with fellow graduate students and future bioinformaticians Gary Stormo and David Haussler, was drawn by Ehrenfeucht's curiosity about such basic questions as how to compare DNA sequences and how to build evolutionary trees.

Myers landed his first faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. Throughout his research career, he has been interested in sequence assembly. He recollected. “While I developed many seminal algorithms for sequence comparison and search in the '80s and early '90s, including BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool), the problem that has and continues to fascinate me to this day is sequence assembly.” He is well-known for being one of the authors of the 1990 manuscript that first described BLAST, a groundbreaking algorithm that is still used today for sequence comparison. This paper is also one of the most cited papers in scientific literature.

Myers’s interest in sequence assembly led him to promote the idea that whole genome shotgun sequencing could be used on the large and unwieldy human genome. Craig Venter brought Myers to Celera Genomics in 1998 during their push to sequence the human genome. Myers recalled writing thousands of lines of code to build algorithms that could assemble the vast amounts of sequence data. He considers the success of this landmark sequencing project as a highlight of his career.

In 2002, Myers returned to academia in a position at the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Integrative Genomics. More recently, Myers headed a lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)'s Janelia Farm Research Campus. In 2012, he moved to Dresden, Germany to serve as a director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and the Klaus-Tschira chair of the Systems Biology Center. Myers describes that his “latest focus all started because [he] wish[es], like many, to ‘decode’ the genome.” His work has evolved into building microscopic devices and image analysis tools that can be used to observe and model the inner workings of cells and biological systems. He sees this type of work as having the potential to revolutionize medicine. He said, “Really understanding (in molecular terms) what a cell can do and how what it does affects its role in a complex tissue or organ will greatly advance medicine and treatment as well as help us understand
variation across species and how organisms develop.”

Myers recounted the importance of key mentors in the success of his career. Myers met Webb Miller when he was a young faculty member at the University of Arizona in the early 1980s. The two struck up a fruitful collaboration that led to many early papers about sequence analysis. Myers explained, “Miller helped me greatly in the early part of my career in that he taught me, through example, that writing can be fun.” Myers gained a different sort of insight while working for Venter at Celera. He described Venter as “a master of the sound bite, and while this may sound trivial, it is actually more important than one might think.

"Much of one’s career success depends on the ability to present one’s ideas in powerful, succinct, clear ways.”

Myers believes that mentorship should be “about shaping the character of the individual and their understanding of their role within the research community.” He starts with himself as he aims to “do [his] best to be a good role model, to instill values of integrity, objectivity, and openness.” Myers has trained students from varied academic backgrounds throughout his career, and affirmed that, “there is no substitute for passion.”

Myers’s unique contributions to computational biology have been recognized by several awards, including election to the National Academy of Engineering (2003), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Kannellakis Prize (2002), and the International Max Planck Research Prize (2004). Bonnie Berger (MIT), chair of the ISCB Nominating Committee, sees Myers as an exemplar of the Achievement by a Senior Scientist Award. Berger stated that, “Myers is one of the founders of the field, bringing his algorithmic expertise to the most fundamental problems in computational biology. From his role in creating the indispensable and widely used BLAST program for basic sequence search, to breaking the barrier of sequencing the human genome, to deciphering what is coded in DNA, he has launched our discipline. Myers has been a prominent member of the ISCB community, serving on the Board of
Directors, as an ISCB fellow, and as chair and area chair for numerous ISMB meetings.” Alfonso Valencia, leader of the Structural Computational Biology group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center and president-elect of ISCB, also sees Myers as a stellar representative of the field. Valencia said of this year’s award winner, “I am particularly happy about the election of Gene Myers, since he represents the strong roots of computational biology in algorithmic and method development. The intensity with which he lives science, the originality of his approaches, and the attention he dedicates to the technical details are characteristics of his work and a great example for our new generations of bioinformaticians and computational biologists.”

Myers remains fervent and passionate about the work he does. He contends that his upbringing, which included traveling the globe with his family, as well as his innate passion for science and mathematics have helped make him “flexible, broad-minded, and curious.” He also prefers to keep his research group small while keeping his research vision large. He advises future and active scientists,

“Simultaneously be able to 'go deep' and yet continuously remain in an environment that keeps you in touch with the 'big picture.' And you always have to take on new challenges and new problems.” In the end, he cannot speak strongly enough about the importance of passion and states, “My overarching advice is to do what you are passionate about. Ours is not a career for security or wealth. You have to love it, absolutely love it.”

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Outstanding Contribution to ISCB

ISCB Recognizes its Outstanding Members with the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award

The Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award is in recognition of outstanding service contributions by any member toward the betterment of ISCB through exemplary leadership, education, service, or a combination of the three.

Nominees must be current ISCB members and application should detail the contributions to ISCB made through leadership, education, service, or a combination of the three, and provide examples of these contributions and service to the society.

Self nomination are not permitted. Current ISCB Board Members and Awards Committee Members are not eligible for this award.

2025 Outstanding Contribution to ISCB:  Lucia Peixoto