Links within this page: Ian Lawson Van Toch Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Paper | PDB Best Poster Award | CAMDA COSI | EvolCompGen COSI | HiTSeq COSI | iRNA COSI | NetBio COSI | RegSys COSI | SysMod COSI | TransMed COSI | VarI COSI | SCS 2026
ISMB 2026 was an incredibly successful and memorable event! With over 2,000 participants from various countries, both in-person and online attendance, it was a diverse and engaging experience. The impressive number of talks, panel discussions, and posters shows the depth and breadth of scientific content covered during the conference. The Columbia Ballroom, where participants could interact with exhibitors, provided a great opportunity for networking, job exploration and exploring new ideas and technologies. ISMB 2026 wouldn't be possible without the dedication and hard work of volunteers, and it's heartening to see their efforts being acknowledged. Plan now to join us in 2027 in Copenhagen, Denmark, July 18-22. ISMB/ECCB 2027 is a highlight of the summer for the scientific community, and the upcoming conference in Copenhagen holds promising prospects for further scientific advancement and collaboration.
Ian Lawson Van Toch Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Paper
Peter Halmos, Princeton University, United States
Riemannian Metric Learning for Alignment of Spatial Multiomics
With Support From:
PDB Poster Award
Gabriel Olguin-Orellana
• PIP2 Binding at the TMIE-TMC1 Interface Reveals a Putative Lipid Regulatory Site in the Hair-Cell MET Channel
CAMDA COSI
1st prize: Charlene Jarrell
• Does Synthetic Bulk RNA-seq Data Protect Donors? Privacy Auditing through Membership Inference Attacks
2nd prize: Ruixuan Liu
• A Unified Weighted-Distance Framework for No-Box Membership Inference Attacks on Synthetic Gene Expression Data
3rd prize: R. Prabakaran
• Quantifying uncertainty in protein representations across models and tasks
Runner Up: David Danko
• An Accurate Machine Learning Workflow for Inference of Antimicrobial Resistance from Bacterial Genomes
EvolCompGen Awards
Best Talk prize: Nishat Anjum Bristy
• Bounding mutations for a subsampling-placement strategy to reconstruct clonal lineage trees for somatic evolution
Best Poster prize: Thodoris Danis
• Modular Genomic Architectures Underlie Mammalian Life-History Diversity (C-107)
HiTSeq Award
Best Talk Prize: Michael Goneos
• Pilot discovery of allele-specific modification QTLs from long-read RNA sequencing
Best Poster Prize: Bhargav Srinivasan
• Label-Free Detection of Epigenetic Modifications from Raw Nanopore Signals
iRNA Award
1st poster prize: Megan Miaro
• Prediction of non-canonical base pairs using structural constraints from sequence comparison
2nd poster prize: Senbao Lu
• Assessing the Physiological Fate of Alternatively Spliced Protein Isoforms through Proteogenomic Machine Learning at Genome Scale
NetBio COSI
Best Talk: Neha Sontakke
• Bayesian Likelihood-based Inference of Metabolic Modules for Prokaryotes (BLIMMP)
Best Poster - Method: Aydin Wells
• Traditional machine learning vs. deep learning from dynamic graph representations of proteins’ 3D folds in the task of protein structure classification
Best Poster - Method: Mathew Fischbach
• Genetic Interaction-based Machine Learning Models for Disease Risk Prediction
Best Poster - Case-Study/Application: Soukaina Amniouel
• Development of a Genotype Specific Multi-Omics Framework for Precision Modeling in NGLY1 Deficiency
RegSys COSI
Best Presentation Award RegSys 2026: Elizabeth Gilfeather
• When Less Is Enough: Low-rank Structure in DNA Sequence-to-Function Models
Best Poster Award RegSys 2026: Junjie Tang
• SpiderNet reveals a meta-interaction basis for cell-cell communication in tissues
SysMod COSI
1st place: Ricardo A. Vialle
• Integrative multi-omics factorial analysis reveals mechanisms of heterogeneity in Alzheimer’s disease
2nd place: Adam Bates
• Data selection significantly impacts automated reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic networks
3rd place: August George
• ChatGEM: An Agentic System for In Silico Genome-Scale Metabolic Engineering
TransMed COSI
TransMed Awards: Best Oral Presentations
Chenlian (Tom) Fu
• Routine Clinical Time Series Predict Cancer Adverse Events
Mengying (Summer) Xia
• Integrative Single-Cell and Spatial Omics Reveal Temporal-Spatial Dynamics of Fibroblast Subtypes during AKI-to-CKD Transition
TransMed Awards: Best Poster Presentations
Carolina Alvarez-Garavito
• Bayesian latent-variable modelling reveals a consistent Th17-driven inflammatory signature in Long Covid
Aishwarya Mandava
• Biobank-scale clinical phenotype prediction through shared genetics using graph-based machine learning
VarI COSI
Best Oral Presentation for Abstract
1st place: Justin Delano
• PPI-seq: A Massively Parallel System to Decode Genetic Variant Impacts on Protein Interactions
2nd place - tie:
Frederick Kamanu and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
• Machine Learning-Based Deconstruction of Polygenic Risk Scores for Identification of Age-Dependent Genetic Effects
Alena Orlenko
• Genetic data-driven prioritization of druggable transcription factors in Alzheimer's Disease
Best Poster Presentations
Ann Cirincione
• CRISPRme+: expanding variant-aware off-target analysis for diverse and personal genomes
Haneen Abderrazzaq
• Calibration of in-frame indel variant effect predictors for clinical variant classification
Douglas Meyer
• Evaluating Aggregated Gene Level eQTL Scores
SCS 2026
Best Oral Presentation: Thomas Smits
• Similarity-based counts weighting improves differential T cell clonotype abundance analysis
Best Flash Talk: Elliot Wald
• The Shank3∆C mutation differentially impacts the molecular response to sleep deprivation across development
Best Poster: Sophia Cheng
• Discovering Biological Signals in the Noise