ISCB Buzz: More News, Events and Announcements!

Call for Excellence in Science Award Nominations
FASEB is seeking nominations for our 2019 Excellence in Science Award. The award recognizes outstanding achievement by women in biological science who have accomplished scientific work of lasting impact and have contributed substantially to training the next generation of scientists.  Women who are members of one or more FASEB Member Societies are eligible for nomination. Nomination forms must be submitted by 11:59 pm/ET on March 1, 2018.
 

NGS 2018 Call for Submissions - Late Breaking Research
Submit your Late Breaking Research to The Next Generation Sequencing Conference 2018 (NGS 2018), a dedicated meeting on cutting-edge approaches to the processing and analysis of Next Generation Sequencing data.
- Late Breaking Deadline:  February 21, 2018!


ISCB Leadership Nominations and Elections
Call for nominations for Treasurer and Vice President, and for Board of Directors. Student Council Leadership positions for Chair, Chair-elect, Treasurer, Secretary, and representative to the Board of Directors.
Only members can nominate; self-nominations are not allowed.


VIZBI 2018:  Early Registration Deadline February 23, 2018!
The 9th international conference on Visualizing Biological Data bridges bioinformatics, data visualization, human-computer interaction and design. It is aimed at scientists, technologists, and the creative community who develop or work with tools for the visualization of biological data, and features keynotes from Kim Goodwin (PatientsLikeMe, USA), Anders Ynnerman (Linköping U., Swed.) and Drew Berry (Water and Eliza Health Institute, Aus).  
ISCB Member Discount:  15%

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ISCB Buzz: Latest News, Events and Announcements!

UPCOMING CONFERENCES

NGS 2018 April 9 – 11, 2018 Barcelona, Spain	RECOMB 2018 April 21 – 24, 2018 Paris	ISMB 2018 July 6 – 10, 2018 Chicago, Illinois	ECCB 2018 Sept 8 – 12, 2018 Athens, Greece

ISCB Art in Science
The ISCB Art in Science Competition is a way to show the beauty of science in art form. ISCB invites submission to the 2018 ISCB Art in Science competition. All interested members (hereafter referred to as "artists") may submit images that have been generated as part of a research project and other creative efforts that involve scientific concepts or employ scientific tools and methods. Learn more at www.iscb.org/iscb-art-in-science-competition.
 

NGS 2018 Call for Submissions - Late Breaking Research
Submit your Late Breaking Research to The Next Generation Sequencing Conference 2018 (NGS 2018), a dedicated meeting on cutting-edge approaches to the processing and analysis of Next Generation Sequencing data.
- Late Breaking Deadline:  February 21, 2018!


2018 Essay Contest Now Open - Deadline: March 30, 2018
The Lasker Essay Contest engages young scientists and clinicians in a discussion about big questions in biology and medicine, and the role of biomedical research in our society today.  The Contest aims to build skills in communicating important medical and scientific issues to broader audiences. For all contest information, visit
www.laskerfoundation.org/programs/lasker-foundation-essay-contest/


ISCB Announces the 2018 ISCB Award Winners
The International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, Innovator Award, and Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award. Ruth Nussinov, NIH, NCI, is the winner of the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award. Cole Trapnell, University of Washington, is the Overton Prize winner. M. Madan Babu, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK is the winner of the ISCB Innovator Award. Russ Altman, Stanford University has been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award.


ISCB Congratulates the 2018 Class of Fellows
The ISCB Fellows program was created to honor members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. During the 2009 inaugural year of the program, the ISCB Board of Directors unanimously conferred Fellows status on the seven winners-to-date of the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award. Since 2010, ISCB has sought Fellows nominations from our members, with eligibility restrictions based on membership, and selection criteria focused most heavily on the significance of scientific contributions to our field and to ISCB. We were pleased to receive many excellent nominations this year, and the Fellows Selection Committee members carefully considered each one. Ultimately, eight nominees were elected as this year's newest Fellows.


NSF Survey on Data Products from the NEON Program
The NSF NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network) launched a survey to assess investigator awareness of this new program and learn how researchers intend to utilize the resulting datasets. This information will be used to optimize NEON as it transitions from the construction phase. The survey should take 5-7 minutes to complete, and respondents do not need to be familiar with the NEON program or its data portal.



New FASEB Webinars Highlight Advocacy Skill Building and Science Policy Topics
FASEB is hosting a new series of webinars to help researchers and others in the scientific community enhance their advocacy skills and stay current on relevant science policy topics.  Each 60-minute webinar will share information about FASEB public affairs initiatives and promote opportunities for enhanced collaboration with member societies. The webinars also introduce non-FASEB members to the federation’s public affairs activities. Advanced registration is required for all webinars. 


Call for Participation: GIW 2018, Dec 3-5, Kunming, Yunnan, China
Join us for the 29th International Conference on Genome Informatics (GIW 2018) being held at Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, Yunnan, China, on December 3 - 5, 2018.  GIW 2018 aims to present recent results of both theoretical and practical research, to show new applications, to demonstrate systems, and to indicate directions of future research.


ECCB 2018: Call for Proceedings, Highlights & Posters
On 8-12 September 2018 the Hellenic Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics will organise the seventeenth edition of the European Conference on Computational Biology in association with the ELIXIR. The ECCB 2018 will take place in the historic city of Athens in Greece.  It is the main computational biology event in Europe and will welcome scientists working in a variety of disciplines, including bioinformatics, computational biology, biology, medicine, and systems biology. Participating in ECCB 2018 will be the perfect opportunity to keep pace with cutting edge research, and to network with members of ECCB community.


Save the Date: Chicago Genomics and Data Science Hackathon
From 11-13 July 2018, the NCBI will help out with a Data Science hackathon on the Northwestern School of Medicine Campus in Downtown Chicago! The hackathon will focus on genomics as well as general Data Science analyses including text, image and sequence processing. This event is for researchers, including students and postdocs, who have already engaged in the use of large datasets or in the development of pipelines for analyses from high-throughput experiments. Some projects are available to other non-scientific developers, mathematicians, or librarians.The event is open to anyone selected for the hackathon and willing to travel to Chicago. Please note that this follows directly on the heels of the ISMB 2018 meeting.  For more information, visit https://ncbi-hackathons.github.io.


OUP Open Access Discount!
ISCB works closely with OUP Bioinformatics to reduce open access charges. ISCB is pleased to announce that OUP Bioinformatics will now offer a 15% discount on open access charges for all ISCB members. The discount will be applied after acceptance and requires author noting that he/she is an ISCB member. Not a member? Join today!


ISCB Journal Subscription Discounts - New Titles Added
All ISCB members interested in subscribing to print or online issues of traditional subscription-based journals receive a discount on subscriptions to the journals highlighted below. Student members are entitled to additional discounts, when available. To subscribe, log into My ISCB and select the Subscribe to Journal menu item located on the left-hand menu. Take advantage of this DISCOUNT and order your journal TODAY!


ISCB Career Center
The ISCB Career Center - Connecting you to your career! It is the place to post a job, search for a job, or upload your resume. Job posting and resume upload is complimentary for members. Nonmember may also participate for a nominal fee.


ISCB Membership:
Not yet a member of ISCB? Don't keep missing out on conference discounts, access to incredible science and so much more! Click here for all membership benefits and further details!


Shop while you Support ISCB on AmazonSmile:
AmazonSmile is a simple and automatic way for you to support ISCB every time you shop, at no cost to you. When you shop at smile.amazon.com, you’ll find the exact same low prices, vast selection and convenient shopping experience as Amazon.com, with the added bonus that Amazon will donate a portion of the purchase price to ISCB!

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ISCB Announces 2018 Award Recipients
Russ Altman, Madan Babu, Ruth Nussinov, and Cole Trapnell

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The International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, Innovator Award, and Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award. Ruth Nussinov, NIH, NCI, is the winner of the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award. Cole Trapnell, University of Washington, is the Overton Prize winner. M. Madan Babu, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK is the winner of the ISCB Innovator Award. Russ Altman, Stanford University has been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award.

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Ruth Nussinov, Senior Principal Investigator, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health; Professor, School of Medicine, Department of Human Genetics, Tel Aviv University
Recipient of ISCB Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award

The ISCB Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award recognizes leaders in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics for their significant research, education, and service contributions. Ruth Nussinov is being honored as the 2018 winner of the Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award.

Ruth Nussinov is the Senior Principal Scientist and Principal Investigator at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health and a Professor in the Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.  Nussinov received her B.Sc in Microbiology from University of Washington in 1966, her M.Sc in Biochemistry from Rutgers University in 1967 and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Rutgers in 1977.

Besides her work on nucleic acid secondary structure prediction, Nussinov is also regarded as a pioneer in DNA sequence analysis for her work in the early 1980s. Nussinov’s algorithm for the prediction of RNA secondary structure is still the leading method. She proposed ‘Conformational Selection and Population Shift’ as an alternative to the textbook ‘Induced-Fit’ model in molecular recognition. Her recent studies unveiled the key role of allostery under normal conditions and in disease and the principles of allosteric drug discovery.
 
Dr. Nussinov serves as the Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Computational Biology and she is an elected Fellow of the Biophysical Society and the International Society for Computational Biology. She is a Highly Cited Researcher (ranking among the top 3000 researchers or 1% across all fields according to Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators, http://highlycited.com/ December 2015), earning them the mark of exceptional impact.

She also won an award from the AACR in 2017 for her paper on The Key Role of Calmodulin in KRAS-Driven Adenocarcinomas. mas.

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Cole Trapnell, Assistant Professor, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington
Recipient of the ISCB Overton Prize

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. Cole Trapnell is being recognized as the 2018 winner of the Overton Prize.

Cole Trapnell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. Trapnell received his bachelor’s degree and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. As a graduate student, he was co-advised by Steven Salzberg, and Lior Pachter from the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent several years as a visiting student. While working with Salzberg and Pachter, Trapnell wrote TopHat and Cufflinks, and assisted Ben Langmead with Bowtie.

Dr. Trapnell studies stem cells and differentiation, primarily using high throughput transcriptome sequencing. He is the principal developer of several widely used open-source software tools for analyzing high-throughput sequencing experiments. At the University of Washington, his lab focuses on finding genes that govern stem cell maintenance and cell differentiation, primarily through single-cell genomics.

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M. Madan Babu, Programme Leader, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge
Recipient of ISCB Innovator Award

2016 marked the launch of the ISCB Innovator Award, which is given to a leading scientist who is within a decade and half of receiving her or his PhD degree, and has consistently made outstanding contributions to the field and continues to forge new directions. M. Madan Babu is the 2018 winner of the ISCB Innovator Award.

M. Madan Babu is a Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. He obtained his undergraduate degree in 2001 from the Centre for Biotechnology, Anna University, India with fellowships from the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Academy of Sciences. He then received an LMB-Cambridge International Fellowship and a Trinity College Research Scholarship to carry out his doctoral research at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) in Cambridge, UK.

Babu’s research group aims to gain a detailed understanding of how regulation is achieved at distinct levels of organization in cellular systems by placing a particular emphasis on understanding how the precise structure and intrinsically disordered regions of proteins contribute to cellular regulation. Specifically, he investigates regulation at three levels of organization: molecules, processes and genomes. At the molecular level, Babu aims to discover novel features of regulatory and signalling proteins. At the process level, he aims to understand how the different regulatory mechanisms contribute to cellular homeostasis. At the genome level, he studies the interplay between regulation and genome evolution.

Babu's work has also been recognized with national and international awards including the most recent Blavatnik Awards Life Sciences Laureate (2018), Francis Crick Medal and Lecture from the Royal Society (2015), Protein Society Young Investigator Award (2014), Lister Prize (2014), Biochemical Society of UK’s Colworth Medal (2013), Royal Society of Chemistry’s Molecular BioSystems Award (2011), British Genetics Society’s Balfour Award (2011), and the EMBO Young Investigator Award (2010).  Madan is an executive editor of Nucleic Acids Research, an elected member of EMBO (2016) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2017)

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Russ Altman, Professor, Director, Biomedical Informatics Training Program, Stanford University, Co-Principal Investagor, FDA Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science & Innovation
Recipient of ISCB Outstanding Contributions Award

The Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award recognizes an ISCB member for her or his outstanding service contributions toward the betterment of ISCB through exemplary leadership, education, and service.

This award debuted in 2015, and the 2018 winner is Russ Altman.

Russ Altman is a professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University.  Altman received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1983, a Ph.D. in medical information sciences from Stanford in 1989 and M.D. from Stanford Medical School in 1990. He also became board certified in 1991 in internal medicine and in clinical informatics.

Altman was on the ISCB Board of Directors from 1997-2005, and the ISCB president from 2002-2005. He has provided service to the ISCB membership through his leadership in establishing and helping to organize the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. Altman is the Editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (since 2009), and he is a current member of the editorial boards for many major journals in bioinformatics, including Bioinformatics and PLOS Computational Biology. He served on the steering committee for the IEEE-ACM Transactions on Computational Biology (TCBB) from 2009-2011.  He is also an executive editor of Biomedical Computational Review, which covers the latest research wherever computation, biology, and medicine intersect.

Altman serves on the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, Francis Collins (since 2012) and was Chair of the Science Board to the FDA Commissioner (2013-2014). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institutes of Medicine), Fellow of ISCB, Fellow of AAAS, Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. He is also the winner of the PECASE award.

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ISCB will present the Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award, Overton Prize, Innovator Award and Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award, at ISMB 2018 (www.iscb.org/ismb2018), which is being held in Chicago, Illinois, USA, July 6 -10. Nussinov, Trapnell, and Babu will also present keynote addresses during the conference.

Full bibliographical articles profiling the award recipients will be available in the ISMB 2018 focus issue of the ISCB newsletter later this year, as well as the ISCB Society Pages in PLOS Computational Biology, OUP Bioinformatics, and F1000 Research ISCB Community Journal.

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ISCB Congratulates the 2018 Class of Fellows

The ISCB Fellows program was created to honor members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. During the 2009 inaugural year of the program, the ISCB Board of Directors unanimously conferred Fellows status on the seven winners-to-date of the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award. Since 2010, ISCB has sought Fellows nominations from our members, with eligibility restrictions based on membership, and selection criteria focused most heavily on the significance of scientific contributions to our field and to ISCB. We were pleased to receive many excellent nominations this year, and the Fellows Selection Committee members carefully considered each one. Ultimately, eight nominees were elected as this year's newest Fellows.

	Patricia C. Babbitt, Univ. of California, San Francisco, for her pioneering contributions to our understanding of sequence-structure-function connections in enzymes, and to our ability to computationally annotate and predict those connections.
	Terry Gaasterland, University of California San Diego, for her service to ISCB since 1996 and her influence in the field of computational biology collecting and annotating pathways (originally through a tool called Magpie).
	Hanah Margalit, Hebrew University, as a research pioneer in the field, demonstrating excellence in teaching and research which led to many "firsts" in various subfields of bioinformatics, from structural biology to small-RNAs.
	Yves Moreau, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven R & D, as one of the top-most formative leaders in computational biology in Europe. Having a background in engineering, he has made important and a broad range of contributions to the analysis of microarray data, to disease gene prioritization and to the analysis of genomics variants in the context of rare genetic diseases.
	Bernard M.E. Moret, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, for mathematical theory and algorithms for comparative genomics and methods for understanding genome evolution, as well as his leadership in the computational biology research community.
	William Pearson, University of Virginia, in recognition for his development, distribution, and continuous improvements to FASTA and other similarity search methods, as well as his teaching of the biological and computational foundations of sequence analysis for more than 25 years.
	Mona Singh, Princeton University, for being one of the first to bring machine learning and sophisticated algorithmic techniques to computational biology and making seminal contributions to a large number of the most important and topical challenges in the field, from protein folding to protein-protein interactions to systems biology.
	Mike Steel, Canterbury University, Christchurch New Zealand, for outstanding contributions to mathematical and computational phylogenetics, and for service to the academic evolutionary biology research community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


These individuals will be recognized for their contributions to computational biology and bioinformatics at the Society’s annual international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Chicago, Illinois, July 6 – 10, 2018. They will receive a certificate and a pin as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.
 
The elected individuals will be part of the ISCB fellow class that increases now to 67 members (www.iscb.org/iscb-fellows).
 
The outcome of this year’s election is presented with great pride. “ISCB Fellows represent research and service excellence within the computational biology and bioinformatics community,” stated Thomas Lengauer, ISCB President. Each of these very accomplished researchers have made exceptional contributions to ISCB’s mission to advance the scientific understanding of living systems through computation.”
 
According to Bonnie Berger, 2018 ISCB Fellows Selection Committee, Chair, “the ISCB Fellows represent the full range of our field, from contributions that are fundamental to computation to those that reveal novel biology through computationally-minded analyses. We hope to continue to emphasize diversity of research, gender, and geography next year.”
 
Congratulations, 2018 Class of Fellows!

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