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Early Reg Deadline: TODAY February 29, 2016!

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Call for Posters --- Submit to ISMB 2016!
Deadline: March 10, 2016

SUBMIT NOW and become part of the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2016 Conference!  Join your colleagues for a unique opportunity to network with over 1400 experts from a wide range of disciplines, including molecular biology, biology, medicine, computer science, mathematics and statistics.

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Early Registration Closing - Register for NGS 2016 & SAVE!

Early Reg Deadline: February 29, 2016!

Don't miss 20+ oral presentations, over 100 posters and an exciting line-up of Keynotes at this engaging conference!

DAVE BURT
The University of Edinburgh

RACHEL KARCHIN
Johns Hopkins University

ERIC KARSENTI
European Molecular Biology Laboratory

SUZI E. LEWIS
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

PETER F. STADLER
University Leipzig

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ISCB Congratulates and Introduces the 2016 Class of Fellows!

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the Fellows Class of 2016. Fellow status is given to ISCB members that have distinguished themselves through exceptional contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. The ISCB Fellows program began in 2009, and 56 members have been conferred with this status to date. 13 Fellows have been selected for this year’s class, and they will be introduced at ISMB 2016 in Orlando, Florida in July.
 
Helen Berman Distinguished Professor / Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers University, USA. For her roles in creating and leading the Protein Data Bank and Nucleic Acids Database, her innovations in computational biology including methods and standards, as well as her distinguished contributions to structural biology.
 
Steven E. Brenner Professor, Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, USA. For his significant research contributions to protein analysis and genetics, and notable organizational service to the field, especially through CAGI and DREAM competitions.
 
Dan Gusfield Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, USA. For his notable contributions to computational biology, particularly his algorithmic work on building evolutionary trees, molecular sequence analysis, optimization problems in population genetics, RNA folding, and integer programming in biology.
 
Barry Honig Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, USA. For his seminal contributions to protein structure prediction and molecular electrostatics, and his more recent work on protein function prediction, protein-DNA recognition, and cell-cell adhesion.
 
Janet Kelso Group Leader, Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. For her excellence in pursuing novel research in computational genomics and her devoted scientific service to the global community through leadership roles in ISCB and bioinformatics journals, support for bioinformatics education, and involvement in the global development of bioinformatics.
 
Michal Linial Professor, Biological Chemistry / Director, Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology / Director, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. For her pioneering work on automatic classification of protein sequences and function prediction, for bringing Bayesian networks and compressed sensing to our community for expression data analysis, and for her above-and-beyond service and numerous contributions to ISCB.
 
Christine Orengo Professor, Division of Biosciences, University College London, UK. For her outstanding contributions to protein structure classification in the CATH resource, the development of novel robust algorithms to determine structural and functional relationships between proteins, and her numerous contributions to ISCB.
 
Aviv Regev Core Member, Broad Institute, and Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. For her outstanding research in systems biology, particularly her work on molecular circuitry, gene regulation, and, more recently, cancer genomics.

Lincoln Stein Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, and Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Canada. For his roles in the formative consortia of computational biology, including the Human Genome Project, HapMap, Reactome, BioPerl, Wormbase, co-leading bioinformatics for ModEncode, and developing and leading GMOD.
 
Sarah Teichmann Group Leader, European Molecular Biology Laboratory - European Bioinformatics Institute, UK. For her work on elucidating the domain characteristics of prokaryotic proteins, introducing graph theory to represent protein domain combinations as networks, developing predictive models for transcription factor-DNA interactions in gene regulation, and statistical methods for single-cell transcriptomics, as well as her service on numerous editorial boards and conference committees.
 
Anna Tramontano Chair Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy. For being a world leader in the field of bioinformatics, in particular protein structure prediction and analysis, and making numerous contributions to bioinformatics research, ISCB leadership, and education.
 
Shoshana J. Wodak Professor, Visiting Group Leader, Vlaamse Institute of Biotechnology, Structural Biology Research Center, Free University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium. For her pioneering work on docking algorithms for the prediction of protein-protein interactions and her role on the management committee of CAPRI (Criticial Assessment of Predicted Interactions), a community-wide initiative on evaluating methods for the prediction of protein interactions, on which she has served since 2001.
 
Haim Wolfson Professor, Department of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Israel. For pioneering the introduction of Computer Vision motivated 3D pattern discovery algorithms into computational structural biology, co-developing the geometric hashing methodology, and developing highly efficient algorithms for protein structural alignment, protein-protein docking, binding site comparison, and integrative modeling of large multi-molecular assemblies.

Short bibliographical articles profiling the 2016 Class of Fellows will be available in the ISMB 2016 focus issue of the ISCB newsletter later this year, as well as the ISCB Society Pages in PLOS Computational Biology, OUP Bioinformatics, and ISCB Community Journal hosted by F1000.

 

ISCB Announces 2016 Award Recipients

Søren Brunak, Debora Marks, Burkhard Rost, and Serafim Batzoglou Named 2016 ISCB Award Winners

The International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2016 Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award, and the Innovator Award. Søren Brunak of the Technical University of Denmark is the winner of the Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award. Debora Marks of Harvard Medical School is the Overton Prize winner. Burkhard Rost of the Technical University of Munich has been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award, and Serafim Batzoglou of Stanford University is the inaugural winner of the ISCB Innovator Award.
 
Søren Brunak
The ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award recognizes leaders in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics for their significant research, education, and service contributions. Søren Brunak is being honored as the 2016 winner of the Senior Scientist Award.
 
Brunak was the founding Director of the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark and is a pioneer in the field of bioinformatics. He founded the center in 1993, one of the first departments dedicated exclusively to bioinformatics. Brunak’s research is deeply rooted in combining computer science, physics, biology and biotechnology, and his early work on neural networks and other predictive methods led to the development of several widely-used bioinformatics methods. Brunak has made significant contributions to the field of network biology, particularly his work on the analysis of the evolution of protein complexes during the cell cycle. He has also been deeply involved in many large-scale studies of human genomes, ancient genomes and metagenomics. Brunak is now focusing on his Program for Disease Systems Biology at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen where he more recently developed methods to extract information about diseases and drugs from medical records, the relationship between comorbidities and the influence of different drugs on disease progression.
 
Debora Marks
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. Debora Marks is being recognized as the 2016 winner of the Overton Prize.
 
Marks is an Assistant Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and is an emerging leader in the field of computational biology. She has used her background in mathematics and computational biology to create an interdisciplinary research program that develops computational methods aimed at tackling fundamental biological questions. Marks’s early work revealed the extent by which microRNAs regulate gene expression, and these results have been critical for advancing the development of small RNA therapeutics. Marks has recently made significant contributions to understanding protein structure based solely on sequence information.
 
Burkhard Rost
The Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award recognizes an ISCB member for his or her outstanding service contributions toward the betterment of ISCB through exemplary leadership, education, and service. This award debuted in 2015, and the 2016 winner is Burkhard Rost.
 
Burkhard Rost is the Chair of Bioinformatics at the Technical University of Munich and past President of ISCB. Rost has been a seminal force in the formation and growth of ISCB since its inception through his many years of service, which include serving on the founding Board of Directors, serving as ISCB President from 2007 to 2014, and co-chairing and shaping ISCB’s flagship meeting, ISMB (Intelligent Systems of Molecular Biology), for several years. As an example, his highly successful Highlights Track has greatly enhanced the meeting. Rost increased the worldwide reach of ISCB by starting a series of international meetings in places such as Africa and South America, and he advocated for the greater involvement of ISCB trainees through the formation of the ISCB Student Council. Rost’s contributions to computational biology research have also been recognized by his election as a 2015 ISCB Fellow.
 
Serafim Batzoglou
2016 marks the launch of the ISCB Innovator Award, which is given to a leading scientist who is within two decades of receiving his or her PhD degree, has consistently made outstanding contributions to the field and continues to forge new directions. Serafim Batzoglou, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, is the inaugural winner of the ISCB Innovator Award.
 
Batzoglou has made many critical research contributions throughout his career, including his early work developing the ARACHNE algorithm and program for the assembly of whole genomes from shotgun sequencing data, which was critical to the efforts of the Human Genome Consortium. He has been a leader in the field of comparative genomics and has also developed widely-used tools for multiple sequence alignments including LAGAN and multi-LAGAN.
 
ISCB will present the Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award, and Innovator Award at ISMB 2016, which is being held in Orlando, Florida on July 8 -12, 2016. Brunak, Marks, and Batzoglou will also present keynote addresses during the conference.
 
Full bibliographical articles profiling the award recipients will be available in the ISMB 2016 focus issue of the ISCB newsletter later this year, as well as the ISCB Society Pages in PLOS Computational Biology, OUP Bioinformatics, and ISCB Community Journal.

Mark Your Calendars for for ISCB Affiliated Conferences!

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DON'T FORGET

ISMB 2016 Highlights Submission Deadline March 10, 2016 ........................................ ISMB 2016 LBR Submission Deadline Deadline April 4, 2016 ........................................ Fight Against Ebola Award Deadline April 10, 2016

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ISCB Buzz: ISCB Buzz: ISCB Ebola Award, Conference Updates & More!

Conference Updates

GLBIO/CCBC 2016 Abstract Submission Deadline:
07 March

NGS 2016 Early Registration Closes:
29 February




Call for Submissions
Submissions are being requested for the new Fight Against Ebola Award. ISCB will award the winning submission at ISMB 2016. Deadline for submissions is April 10, 2016. Click here for more information.

Bonnie Berger to be Inducted into Medical & Biological Engineering Elite!
The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the pending induction of Bonnie Berger, Ph.D., Professor of Applied Math and Computer Science at MIT, and head of the Computation and Biology group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to its College of Fellows.




Registry of Standards
Share your feedback - help us to help you! We would like to ask you 10 questions to assess your needs for a registry of standards in the life, environmental, and biomedical sciences.

FASEB Releases Reproducibility Recommendations
On January 14, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) issued Enhancing Research Reproducibility, a set of recommendations aimed to promote the reproducibility and transparency of biomedical and biological research.

ISCB Executive Committee Responds to New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) Data Sharing and the Journal

The recent editorial by Drs. Longo and Drazen in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) [1] has stirred up quite a bit of controversy. As Executive Officers of the International Society of Computational Biology, Inc. (ISCB), we express our deep concern about the restrictive and potentially damaging opinions voiced in this editorial. While some of the concerns voiced by the authors of the editorial are worth considering, large parts of the statement purport an obsolete view of hegemony over data that is neither in line with today’s spirit of open access nor furthering an atmosphere where the potential of data can be fully realized.

We acknowledge that the additional comment on the editorial [2] eases some of the polemics, unfortunately without addressing some of the core issues. We still feel, however, that we need to contrast the opinion voiced in the editorial with what we consider the axioms of our scientific society, statements that lead into a fruitful future of data-driven science:

• Data produced with public money should be public in benefit of the science and society
• Restrictions to the use of public data hamper science and slow progress
• Open data is the best way to combat fraud and misinterpretations

Current large data collections proceed from many sources are continually accumulated and require a variety of analytical approaches. Data generation and data analysis overlap in time and are continually updated with new data sets produced by new techniques and new analysis methodologies. Furthermore, in many cases current science functions in consortia in which scientists collaborate toward common goals while preserving their own scientific objectives. Dividing scientists into data providers and data analysts is simplistic and gives a misleading impression of the actual state of biological and biomedical science.

We very much support collaboration between disciplines, including experimental and clinical as well as bioinformatics, as the best way forward to address complex biological problems. But this collaboration cannot be based on imposed restrictions to data access and cannot be contained in professional silos. (The use of expressions such as “research parasites” clearly does not help.)

Many bio-communities have made significant progress by endorsing open data policies and, gratefully, public funding agencies have connected to the spirit that they are distributing taxpayers’ money to science and that, therefore, the data that are generated in the course belong to the public. It is, perhaps, natural that some areas of biomedical research are slow in adopting these policies. History and the confidential nature of the relevant data are surely one of the reasons. However, in our opinion data hegemony is another, a reason that has to be overcome. The sooner these barriers to progress are removed the sooner the patients will benefit from the current flourishing of biomedical research.

1. Longo, D.L. and J.M. Drazen, Data Sharing. N Engl J Med, 2016. 374(3): p. 276-7.
2. Drazen, J.M., Data Sharing and the Journal. New Engl J Med.

Respectfully submitted,

ISCB Executive Committee

Alfonso VALENCIA, President
Bonnie BERGER, Vice President
Terry GAASTERLAND, Vice President
Thomas LENGAUER, Vice President
Christine ORENGO, Vice President
Bruno GAETA, Treasurer
Scott MARKEL, Secretary

Contact Person: Executive Office (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Register Now & Save: NGS 2016!

Early Reg Deadline: February 29, 2016!

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DON'T FORGET

GLBIO/CCBC 2016 Abstract Submission Deadline March 7, 2016 ........................................ ISMB 2016 Highlights Submission Deadline March 10, 2016

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ISCB Buzz:  Conference Updates, Translational Bioinformatics 2016, Ebola Award & Much More!

Conference Updates

GLBIO/CCBC 2016:
- Full Paper Submissions Deadline: 01 February
- GLBIO/CCBC 2016 Abstract Submission Deadline: 07 March


Call for Nominations for annual review of Translational Bioinformatics 2016!
Call for nominations of exciting papers published between January 2015 and the present.  The talk will be held on March 21 in San Francisco as part of www.amia.org/jointsummits2016. 

Thomson Reuters Worlds Most Influential Scientific Minds of 2015!
ISCB members; Gad Getz, Eric Lander, Alex Bateman, among others noted in the 2015 listing of Thomas Reuters Worlds Most Influential Scientific Minds of 2015 report!  Read more.

Call for Submissions
Submissions are being requested for the new ISCB Fight Against Ebola Award.  ISCB will award the winning submission at ISMB 2016.  Deadline for submissions is April 10, 2016.  Click here for more information.

ISCB Cited in the Landscape of Bioinformatics Education
ISCB's Education Committee Curriculum Task Force noted in shaping the landscape of bioinformatics education!  Click here for the article.