The Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the results of the recent officer elections. Members of the society elected the following as incoming officers beginning January 21, 2016:
Treasurer – Bruno Andre Gaeta, Ph.D., University of New South Wales, Australia. Bruno is a Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics and Program Director (Bioinformatics) with the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales. His research interests are in the engineering of computer methods and software to better understand the immune system and especially the basis for the "memory" of the immune system and vaccines. Bruno is a current member of the ISCB Board of Directors and serves as co-chair to the ISCB Affiliated Groups Committee.
Vice President – Terry Gaasterland, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, USA. Terry Gaasterland is a Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics at UCSD, and the Director of the Scripps Genome Center. Terry is currently developing and using computational methods to analyze genome and transcriptome sequence data and gene expression data to gain biological insights into an organism and making predictions about molecular processes. She is a current member of the ISCB Board of Directors and returning as an elected Vice President.
This year's election also included ISCB Student Council leadership. The ISCB Board of Directors is pleased to announce the elected young professionals who will lead the ISCB Student Council (SC) in 2016.
• Chair – Pieter Meysman, University of Antwerp, Belgium
• Vice Chair – Alexander Junge, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Treasurer – Jakob Jespersen, Broad Institute, United States
• Secretary – Farzana Rahman, Unviersity of South Wales
• Student Council Representative to ISCB Board of Directors - Jigisha Anupama Darbha, Dublin, Ireland.
For additional information on ISCB's annual nominations and elections procedures please see http://iscb.org/iscb-leadership-a-staff-/officers-and-board-directors/nomination-election-procedures.
The next call for nominations of directors, officers and student council leaders will open February 2016, for terms beginning in January 2017.
ISMB/ECCB 2015 Daily Digest
Day 2 - Monday, July 13, 2015
The second official day of ISMB/ECCB 2015 opened with greetings from the ECCB by Anna Tramontano and an enticing look at ECCB 2016’s meeting location in The Hague, Netherlands by Jaap Heringa. Conference co-chair Janet Kelso introduced keynote speaker Eileen Furlong, who gave a talk titled “Genome regulation during embryonic development.” The day’s sessions were packed with great talks across all theme areas, and two special sessions on translational medicine informatics and data complexity that drew a lot of interest from conference delegates.
During the open business meeting, ISCB president Alfonso Valencia and other members of the executive committee and board highlighted the society’s endeavors to serve its members in multiple areas, including member services, meetings, and publications. ISCB Student Council members also spoke about their activities and recognized the student attendees to whom they awarded travel fellowships. The meeting finished with an opportunity for attendees to share their comments and ideas about different ways ISCB can serve its membership.
Conference co-chair Desmond Higgins introduced the day’s second keynote speaker and Dubliner Kenneth Wolfe, who presented a talk titled “Reversible DNA rearrangement as a switch for cell type in yeasts.” The keynote was followed by another successful poster session in the exhibit hall and the second day closed out with an evening out at the Guinness Storehouse.
ISMB/ECCB 2015 Daily Digest
Day 1 - Sunday, July 12, 2015
ISCB president Alfonso Valencia opened ISMB/ECCB 2015 officially on Sunday, July 12 to a packed auditorium at the Convention Centre Dublin with an overview of ISCB’s activities during the last year. Desmond Higgins, honorary conference chair and Dublin local, also welcomed delegates to his hometown, and Burkhard Rost, ISCB past-president, introduced the opening keynote speaker, Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt. Levitt captivated the audience with his talk titled, “Fun With Large Structures and Masses of Sequence,” and shared his perspective of the early days of computational biology as well as his current work on the organization of chaperonin subunits.
Concurrent sessions started after the keynote address and have been organized by themes this year (Genes, Proteins, Systems, Disease, and Data) to make identifying relevant talks easier for attendees.
The 2015 class of ISCB Fellows was honored prior to the second keynote address. Rolf Apweiler, Cyrus Chothia, Julio Collado-Vides, Mark Gerstein, Desmond Higgins, Thomas Lengauer, Michael Levitt, and Burkhard Rost were conferred Fellow status for their outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. Bonnie Berger, chair of the ISCB nominating committee introduced the second keynote speaker, Curtis Huttenhower who is the winner of the 2015 Overton Prize that recognizes the outstanding accomplishments an early career scientist in computational biology or bioinformatics. Huttenhower gave a talk titled, “Understanding microbial community function and the human microbiome in health and disease” and shared results from the diverse microbiome research projects coming out of his lab.
The first official day of ISCB/ECCB 2015 ended with a lively poster reception in the exhibit hall, where delegates talked science and browsed the latest offerings of exhibitors.
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Hot off the Press: The ISMB/ECCB 2015 Program!
The Conference program looks spectacular! There has been a massive growth in the area of translational Bioinformatics with its own Special Session on July 13th as well as many talks within the Disease theme of the conference. It is wonderful to see the promise of Computational Biology to improve health coming to the fore." - Alex Bateman, Conference Co-Chair
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Book Your Hotel by 5PM Friday, June 5th! .
We look forward to welcoming you to Dublin!
Join your colleagues for the premier conference on bioinformatics, ISMB/ECCB 2015!