About ISMB

ISMB/ECCB 2021 - July 25 -30, Virtual Event

With a focus on everyone’s safety, ISMB/ECCB 2021 conference is going virtual. Capitalizing on the successes from last year and improving our platform in response to your suggestions, ISMB/ECCB 2021 will bridge time zones, enabling our global community to gather, share, network, and learn all from the comfort of your choosing.

The ISMB/ECCB conference alliance has become synonymous with collaboration, fostering fresh dialogue, and providing inumerable learning opportunities. Moving the conference to a state of the art virtual interface will not change what attendees have come to expect from this conference. The virtual interface will only enhance the attendee experience and ensure that more of you can enjoy it.

Here is what to expect in the virtual environment:

Training workshops and tutorials
Student Council Symposium
Live and on-demand sessions to benefit attendees from all time zones
500+ expected scientific talks
Live question and answer feature to engage with the speaker during sessions
Live chat feature to engage with other participants within your session room
Dedicated time for research presentation within the Research Exchange Forum (formally Poster Hall)
Ability to serendipitously make new connections when utilizing the attendee profile and match maker features
Schedule one-on-one time with speakers, poster presenters, exhibitors, and sponsors to learn more about their work, products, or services
Exclusive access to the ISMB/ECCB 2021 on-demand repository of talks and poster presentations for viewing at your leisure after conference dates

Though we realize nothing replaces trying to run across a convention center between sessions, ISCB is making every effort to create a virtual experience that mirrors an in-person experience with less sore feet at the end of the day. Opportunities to present your research are still available.

Thank you for your continued support of ISCB and ECCB, and we look forward to “seeing” you in July for ISMB/ECCB 2021, the premier virtual event of the year!

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About ISMB

The ISMB conferences began in 1993 and were the driving force behind the founding of the International Society for Computational Biology in 1997, which has been organizing this conference ever since. ISCB is the only society representing computational biology on a worldwide scale and its flagship conference ISMB has become the largest conference on computational biology worldwide. ISCB continues to see ISMB as its major flagship annual event.

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ISMB Mission

The ISMB conference series aims at attracting the top research contributions in all areas of computational molecular biology. Typical, but not exclusive, the topics of interest are: Sequence analysis, Evolution and phylogeny, Comparative genomics, Protein structure, Molecular and supramolecular dynamics, Molecular evolution, Gene regulation and transcriptomics, Proteomics, Systems biology, Ontologies, data bases and data integration, Text mining and information extraction, and Human health. The conference also aims to attract participants from related disciplines in order to understand the need that exists for computational approaches in related fields, and to gain from approaches taken in other disciplines that might be appropriate for computational biology.

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ISMB History

The Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, known today as simply ISMB, was started in the early 1990's to bring together researchers with an interest in applying a computational approach to biological investigation. At that time it was challenging to find people who did this work in either computer science or molecular biology, as few scientists in either discipline had a clear idea of what bioinformatics was or how to find other people doing it.

Therefore, Lawrence Hunter, then a programmer at the US National Library of Medicine, put to use a popular database he had generated of researchers interested in artificial intelligence and molecular biology from research papers and conference mailing lists by inviting those researchers to a 1992 joint NLM meeting with the National Science Foundation on the future of what was then termed artificial intelligence in molecular biology. The following year, the meeting evolved into the first Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held in Washington DC. That first ISMB attracted approximately 200 scientists; today more than 1500 show up.

In August 2012 PLoS Computational Biology published an article authored by Todd Gibson titled, "The Roots of Bioinformatics in ISMB." The article weaves together the story of ISMB through interviews conducted by the author with several of the founding fathers of the ISMB conference. The results is an interesting look into the origins and maturation of the conference series.

Past keynote addresses

One of the highlights of each ISMB conference is a collection of keynotes delivered by researchers of the highest international esteem who are asked to inform the community of historical perspectives or landmark advances in computational and experimental research, and inject new directions into the field of computational molecular biology. Past keynote speakers are listed below (affiliations are accurate to the year the keynote was given).

Uri Alon (Weizmann Inst of Sci; 2004)
Stephen Altschul (NCBI; 2002)
David Altschuler (Harvard; 2010)
Michale Ashburner (EBI; 2002, U of Cambridge; 2011)
David Baker (U of Washington; 2002)
Amos Bairoch (U of Geneva; 1999)
David Balaban (Affymetrix; 1999)
Ziv Bar-Joseph (Carnegie Mellon U; 2012)
Alexis Battle (John Hopkins University; 2019)
Ewan Birney (EBI; 2005)
Bonnie Berger (MIT; 2011, 2019)
Mathieu Blanchette (McGill U; 2006)
Tom Blundell (U of Cambridge; 2006)
Steven Brenner (UC Berkeley; 2010)
Sydney Brenner (Salk Inst; 2003)
Søren Brunak (DTU; 2007)
Douglas Brutlag (Stanford; 1995)
Bruce Buchanan (U of Pittsburg; 1994)
Chris Burge (MIT; 2001)
Stephen Burley (SGX; 2007)
Howard Cash (Gene Codes; 2005)
Robert Cedergren (U of Montreal; 1998)
George Church (Harvard; 2010)
Elena Conti (EMBL; 2006)
Eugenia Maria del Pino Veintimilla (PUCE; 2009)
Charles DeLisi (Boston U; 2006)
Christophe Dessimoz (University of Lausanne; 2019)
Christopher Dobson (U of Oxford; 2001)
Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie U; 2002)
Russell Doolittle (UCSD; 1996)
Richard Durbin (Wellcome Trust Sanger Inst; 2012)
Sean Eddy (Washington U; 2001)
Gerald Edelman (Neurosciences Inst; 2000)
Manfred Eigen (Max-Planck Goettingen; 1999)
Michael Eisen (Berkely; 2007)
David Eisenberg (UCLA; 2001)
Claire Fraser-Liggett (U of Maryland; 2008)
Terry Gaasterland (Rockefeller U; 2002)
Anne-Claude Gavin (EMBL; 2007)
Pierre-Henri Gouyon (MNHN/CNRS; 2009)
Eric Green (NIH-NHGRI; 2004)
David Haussler (UCSC; 1996, 2008)
Barry Honig (Columbia U; 2002)
Leroy Hood (Inst for Sys Bio; 2000, 2004)
Robert Huber (Max-Planck Munich; 2006)
Bernardo Huberman (Hewlett Packard Labs; 2001)
Peter J Hunter (U of Auckland; 2005)
Lawrence Hunter (NLM; 1994, 2012)
Trey Ideker (UCSD; 2009)
David Jaffe (Broad Inst; 2008)
Fotis Kafatos (EMBL; 2007)
Minoru Kanehisa (Kyoto U; 2000)
Richard Karp (U of Washington; 1999)
Anthony Kerlavage (Celera; 1999)
Daphne Koller (Stanford; 2009)
Eugene Koonin (NCBI/NLM; 1999)
Eric Lander (MIT)
Richard Lathrop (UC Irvine; 1997, 2012)
Thomas Lengauer (Max-Planck Saarbrucken; 2009)
Mike Levine (UC Berkeley)
Susan Lindquist (Whitehead Inst; 2010)
David Lipman (NIH-NCBI; 2004)
Matthias Mann (CEBI; 1999, 2004)
Hanah Margalit (Hebrew U of Jerusalem; 2008)
John Mattick (Queensland; 2007)
J Andrew McCammon (UCSD; 2000)
Marcie McClure (U of Nevada; 1997)
Jill Mesirov (Broad Inst; 2005)
Webb Miller (PA State U; 2009)
Satoru Miyano (U of Tokyo; 2005)
Gene Myers (Celera; 2000, HMMI; 2008)
Denis Noble (U of Oxford; 2004)
William Stafford Noble (University of Washington; 2019)
Erin O20Shea (HHMI; 2007)
Svante Paabo (Max-Planck Leipzig; 2004, 2010)
Bernard O Palsson (UCSD; 2008)
Morag Park (McGill; 2008)
Pavel Pevzner (UCSD; 2005)
Tomaso Poggio (MIT; 2009)
Nikolaus Rajewsky (Helmholtz Association Berlin-Buch; 2019)
Aviv Regev (Broad Inst; 2008)
John Reinitz (SUNY; 2002)
Isidore Rigoutsos (IBM; 2002)
Richard J Roberts (New England Biolabs; 1994, 2006)
Gerald Rubin (HHMI)
Andrej Sali (UCSF; 2012)
Chris Sander (EMBL; 1996, MIT; 2001, MSKCC; 2010)
David Sankoff (Otttawa)
Harold Scheraga (Cornell U; 2000)
Renee Schroeder (U of Vienna; 2007)
David Searls (SKB; 2000)
Eran Segal (Weizmann Inst; 2007)
Luis Serrano (Ctr for Genomic Regulation; 2011)
Temple Smith (Boston U; 2007)
Terry Speed (UC Berkely; 2007)
Michale J E Sternberg (Imperial Cancer Research Fund; 1999)
John Sulston (Sanger Ctr; 1995)
Janet Thornton (U College London; 1995, EBI; 2005, 2011)
Anna Tramontano (U of Rome; 2004)
Olga Troyanskaya (Princeton; 2011)
Mathias Uhlen (KTH; 2009)
Alfonso Valencia (CNIO; 2011)
Craig Venter (Celera)
Gunnar von Heijne (Stockholm U; 2001, 2005, 2012)
Michael Waterman (USC; 1998, 2006)
Robert Waterston (Washington U St. Louis; 1996)
Robert Weinberg (Whitehead Inst; 2010)
Hans Westerhoff (Vrije U; 1997)
Shoshana Wodak (U of Brussells; 1998)
Barbara Wold (CalTech; 2012)
Kurt Wuethrich (ETH; 2006)

Past ISMB Conferences - click here.

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Future ISMB

ISMB/ECCB 2021, July 25-30, Virtual Event
ISMB 2022, July 10 - 14, Madison, Wisconsin, United States
ISMB/ECCB 2023, July 23-27, Lyon, France
ISMB 2024, July 12 - 16 (Thursday - Tuesday, plan accordingly), Montreal, Quebec, Canada
ISMB/ECCB 2025, July 20-24, Liverpool, England

Dates are subject to change.

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ISMB/ECCB Collaboration

The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) has been organized annually since 2002 by a panel of European Computational Biologists and is the only pan-European conference series in this field. In 2004 ISMB and the ECCB joined forces in a common meeting that was by many standards perceived as the most successful such meeting in computational biology to-date. ECCB and ISCB have agreed to share their main meetings whenever ISMB meets in Europe, which is currently planned to be every other year (odd numbered years). The next common meeting will be ISMB/ECCB 2021 - July 25 - 30, 2021 as a Virtual Event

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