Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
Leading Professional Society for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Connecting, Training, Empowering, Worldwide
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
When making your conference plans for this year, don't forget the following ISCB-affiliated conferences. Each offers unique learning opportunities for you and your colleagues to further advance the understanding of our science and the communities we serve. ISCB members are offered a special discount just for being a member. Scroll down for details on upcoming key dates and opportunities.
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
The 20th Anniversary ISMB conference
will be held July 15-17 in Long Beach, California - and we want you there!
The above links will take you to the full details and
guidelines for these ISMB presentation opportunities. From there you can also
access the submission system to submit your work today.
The LBR
Track provides authors an opportunity to present truly late breaking
research to ISMB delegates. As submitted abstracts, there is no requirement to
publish in the conference proceedings, nor to have previously published
elsewhere. Therefore, work that is in progress and planned for future
publication is welcome, and the LBR track is ideal for experimentalists as well
as computer scientists. LBR presentations run in parallel to other conference
sessions and accepted submissions will be given a 20-minute presentation slot
(plus 5 minutes for questions) in the conference agenda.
Posters
will be displayed and presented in one of two sessions during the
conference. Posters are intended to convey a scientific result and are not
advertisements for commercial software packages. Posters may cover any area of
computational biology, and purely experimental work is encouraged. Posters must
include original work that is unpublished or published after August 1, 2011.
* A note about Travel Fellowships: All student and post docs accepted for
presentation in the Proceedings, Highlights, and Late Breaking Research tracks,
along with Poster presenters accepted from the call for posters, are eligible to
apply for travel fellowship funding. An invitation to apply for a Travel
Fellowship is sent to each author who submitted work that was accepted for any
of these tracks (note that submitters to the Late Call for Posters that will
open later this month are not eligible for travel fellowship funding). If the
submitter is not a student or post doc, but the work will be presented by a
co-author named on the submission who is a student or post doc, the invitation
can be passed to that person if funding is necessary to attend the conference.
Due to limited funds, not all eligible applicants can be funded. We are
typically able to fund no more than 20-30% of applicants, and awarded funds are
limited to 50% of the total estimated costs to attend the conference, making
additional funding from the presenter's institution or other sources necessary.
Full details on the ISMB Travel Fellowship program will be available on the
conference website within the next few days.
Additional opportunities still exist for presentations
at the conference that are not eligible for Travel Fellowship funding. These
include Workshops (March 10th deadline), Technology demonstrations (April 20th
deadline), and Late Posters (opening March 19th with April 20th deadline). The
8th annual Student Council Symposium is also accepting submissions through April
2nd, and symposium presenters are eligible for special Travel Fellowship funding
secured and awarded by the Student Council. You can find the submission
deadlines and links to each of these remaining calls on the conference home page
at ISMB 2012.
Registration will open in just a couple of weeks, so please
help spread the word for the strongest possible participation by sharing this
mail with your colleagues and collaborators.
The ISMB 2012 Conference
Co-Chairs and every member of the Scientific Organizing Committee looks forward
to welcoming you to Long Beach this July!
Sincerely,
LBR
Chair: Olga Troyanskaya, Princeton University, United States
LBR Co-chair: Florian Markowetz, Cambridge Research Institute,
United Kingdom
LBR Co-chair: Ioannis Xenarios, Swiss
Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva, Switzerland
and
Posters Chair: Yana Bromberg, Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey, United States
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
As has been reported widely, the
Research Works Act (RWA) that was introduced to the U.S. House of
Representatives late last year was withdrawn by the bill's sponsors on February
27th. ISCB took a strong stand against this bill that posed the latest threat to
public access to federally funded research results. ISCB President, Burkhard
Rost, together with Richard Lathrop, ISCB Public Affairs & Policies Committee
Chair, and Scott Markel, ISCB Publications and Communications Committee Chair,
signed a letter expressing our opposition and emphasizing the importance of the
ISCB
Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research
Literature. The letter was personalized and sent to each of the 39 members
of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and the
content of the letter was shared with all ISCB members and many of our
scientific colleagues around the world. As a result, several scientific news
publications and blogs reported on ISCB's efforts, and we considered it a
victory when Elsevier withdrew its support of RWA days later and the bill was
withdrawn soon thereafter.
Although the tides may be turning in favor of
public access in the long run, it is doubtful that this will be the last veiled
attempt to obstruct such access. If you are a member of ISCB and have not yet
signed on to our policy statement, you can still do so at any time via the link
to current signatories on the policy page noted above.
Thank you,
BJ Morrison McKay, ISCB Executive Officer
on behalf of Burkhard Rost,
Richard Lathrop, Scott Markel, and the ISCB Board of Directors
Attention all ISCB members,
colleagues, and past GLBIO attendees,
The final opportunity to submit
your work for presentation at the
The Great
Lakes Bioinformatics Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan in May is now.
* MARC travel fellowships are available for accepted
presenters (oral and poster) who meet the following criteria: (1) Presenter is a
US citizen or permanent resident, and (2) is from an underrepresented minority
group, and (3) is a student (graduate or undergraduate), post-baccalaureate, or
postdoctoral fellow, and (4) is the first author and will be presenting the oral
or poster presentation at GLBIO 2012. MARC funding is also available for groups
of one faculty member/mentor plus up to two students or post-baccalaureates form
a minority institution. MARC funding for GLBIO is possible through ISCB's
membership in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
(FASEB). Full details are available on the Travel Fellowships page of the GLBIO
website. If you do not meet the eligibility requirements but know someone who
could, please pass this notice to them immediately so they can meet the poster
submission and MARC fellowship application deadlines before they expire.
We look forward to receiving your submission today and to welcoming you to Ann
Arbor in May!
Sincerely,
Your GLBIO 2012 Steering/Organizing
Committee
Dear ISCB Members and Colleagues,
The ISCB Education
Committee began working on a number of activities last fall related to
developing recommendations for a bioinformatics curriculum. We have 3
subcommittees that are described below. A recap of this initiative can be found
in the email included at the bottom of this message (dated September 14, 2011).
After completing an initial survey of the Education committee, we have drafted a
manuscript that we would like to share with you. The manuscript is available on
the blog mentioned below. We are interested in getting your comments on this
draft. While we are soliciting feedback, we will continue to analyze the
information we are collecting in our subcommittees and hope to incorporate this
information in an updated document. We would be happy to have you join in this
effort.
A blog has been set up to gather input:
http://bioinfocurriculum.blogspot.com/. Login is not required.
We are particularly interested in hearing from you about:
1) ideas for publicizing these efforts and involving a broader cross-section of
the computational biology community
2) the draft curriculum (a link to the document is provided on the blog page)
3) the plans to refine the curriculum (see the final paragraph of document)
To post your comments, you can click on the 'comment' link at the bottom of the
blog. Please provide your comments by March 30th, 2012.
We are looking ahead to Long Beach and are organizing a Birds of a Feather (BoF)
at ISMB 2012 to discuss bioinformatics curriculum guidelines (http://www.iscb.org/ismb2012-program/birds-of-a-feather).
Perhaps you can join us in Long Beach to continue this discussion.
Thanks for your interest in this effort. We value your input.
Sincerely,
Fran Lewitter, Lonnie Welch and Russell Schwartz
SUBCOMMITTEE 1 (job opportunities):
Leader: Lonnie Welch
Members: Murlidharan Nair, Steve Jennings
Recent activity: review job postings on ISCB web site for skills required
SUBCOMMITTEE 2 (existing curricula):
Leader: Russell Schwartz
Members: Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Celia van Gelder, Antoine H.C. van Kampen, Scott
J. Emrich, Murlidharan Nair, Shifra Ben-Dor, Erich Baker
Recent Activity: review existing curricula at for Bioinformatics degree granting
programs
SUBCOMMITTEE 3 (core facilities):
Leader: Fran Lewitter
Members: Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Scott J. Emrich, Shifra Ben-Dor, Lakshmanan Iyer,
Erich Baker, Winston Hide, Takis Benos
Recent Activity: survey bioinformatics core facility directors to regarding
hiring practices
=======================
From: Welch, Lonnie
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 10:56 PM
To: 'Fran Lewitter'; education
Subject: RE: ISCB Education Committee initiatives and minutes from 7/17/11
meeting
Dear Members of the ISCB Education Committee,
I would like to invite your participation in our committee's task force on
curriculum.
During spring and summer of 2011, we constructed a straw man curriculum that is
based on a survey of our committee and of the EMBnet community. The result of
this effort is being written up in a report for the ISCB column in PLoS
Computational Biology.
We plan to refine the curriculum via the following tasks:
1. Survey job opportunities (led by Lonnie Welch)
2. Survey existing curricula (led by Russell Schwartz)
3. Survey perspectives of Directors of Bioinformatics Core Facilities and
biological researchers (led by Fran Lewitter)
We plan to perform the surveys during fall 2011 and to incorporate our findings
into the EduComm bioinformatics curriculum during winter 2012.
Please let us know if you would like to be involved in this effort. In your
reply, specify which of the 3 tasks interest you (feel free to select as many of
the 3 as you wish).
Best regards,
Lonnie Welch
--
Lonnie R. Welch, Stuckey Professor
Director of the Bioinformatics Laboratory
School of Elec. Eng. & Computer Science,
Biomedical Engineering Program,
Molecular and Cellular Biology Program
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701
740-593-1575 (office); 740-818-9521 (mobile)
www.ohio.edu/cidds/welch/