| Founded | 1997 |
|---|---|
| Home Page | International Society for Computational Biology |
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Current ISCB Officers |
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| President | Burkhard Rost, Technical University Munich |
| Vice-president | Terry Gaasterland, University of California, San Diego |
| Vice-president | Michal Linial, Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Vice-president | Scott Markel, Accelrys |
| Treasurer | Reinhard Schneider, EMBL |
| Secretary | Janet Kelso, Max-Planck Institute |
| Executive Officer | BJ Morrison-McKay |
The International Society for Computational Biology, ISCB, is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. Founded in 1997, the society's core mission is to contribute to the scientific understanding of living systems through computation.
ISCB seeks to communicate the significance of computational biology to the larger scientific community, to governmental organizations, and to the general public; the society serves its members locally, nationally, and internationally; it provides guidance for scientific policies, publications, meetings, and distributes information through multiple platforms. ISCB organizes the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, ISMB, conference every year, a growing number of smaller, more regionally or topically focused annual and bi-annual conferences, and has two official journals: PLoS Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. The society awards two prizes each year, the Overton Prize and the Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award,[1] and it inducts Fellows, to honor members that have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.
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A president, an executive committee, and a board of directors comprise ISCB's scientific leadership, drawing on distinguished, internationally renowned researchers who are elected for their term by the general society membership. The executive officer leads the ISCB staff and supports a diverse set of committees dedicated to specific issues that are important to the computational biology and bioinformatics community, including education, policy, and publications.
ISCB has the following aims:
ISCB grew out of the need for a stable organizational structure to support the planning and manage the finances of the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference series, which had its start in 1993. ISMB is ISCB's most prominent annual activity, toward which a significant portion of resources are dedicated each year. Since 2004, when ISMB is held in Europe, it is held jointly with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB).
ISCB began expanding its conference offerings with the introduction of the annual Rocky Mountain Bioinformatics Conference series in 2003, the annual Conference on Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences (CSHALS) in 2008, the bi-annual ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics in 2009, and the bi-annual ISCB Latin America Conference in 2010. Future plans include the development of an ISCB Asia Conference.
In addition to ISCB-organized conferences, the society supports other computational biology and bioinformatics conferences through affiliations and sponsorships. These include the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing or PSB, the annual international conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology or RECOMB, the annual Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network's International Conference on Computational Biology or InCoB, and the annual general meeting of the European Molecular Biology Network or EMBnet.
The ISCB has several affiliated organizations (mainly regional), including:
Africa
Asia
Europe and Middle East
North America
South America
In 1996 the ISMB conference steering committee thought it would be useful to start a scientific society focused on managing all scientific, organizational, and financial aspects of the ISMB conference and to provide a forum for scientists to address the emerging role of computers in the biological sciences. The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), was legally incorporated in the US in 1997 with Larry Hunter, currently director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the university's computational bioscience program, elected as its inaugural president by the members of the founding board of directors: Pankaj Agarwal, Russ Altman, Douglas Brutlag, Dominic Clark, Keith Dunker, Janice Glasgow, Rick Lathrop, Peter Karp, Asai Kiyoshi, Teri Klein, Chris Overton, Christos Ouzounis, David Searls, Jude Shavlik, Randall Smith, David States, Alfonso Valencia, and Shoshana Wodak.
During the next few years the focus remained on management of the annual ISMB conference, whose 1993 attendance of approximately 200 researchers had more than tripled by 1999. That year Bioinformatics (previously published as CABIOS) by Oxford University Press became the official journal of the ISCB. Dues-paying members of the society gained two tangible benefits of membership: ISMB conference registration discounts and an online subscription to the journal.
The new millennium brought in a new president in Russ Altman,[4] currently chair of Stanford University's department of bioengineering and director of the program in biomedical informatics, and over 1,200 delegates attended ISMB 2000 in San Diego. Altman took steps to formalize some of the legal and administrative aspects of ISCB before passing the torch in 2002 to Philip E. Bourne,[5] currently professor in the department of pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Bourne gave ISCB a more permanent home at UCSD, which included the university's commitment to host the society through at least 2005 and its offer of staff support. Although Bourne served as president for only one year, he left his mark on the society by increasing the interaction with regional groups and conference organizers worldwide, and through an improved web presence. During his tenure, membership grew to more than 1700 researchers, and the 2002 ISMB conference in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada welcomed over 1,600 attendees.
In 2002 ISCB Vice President Anna Tramontano[6] initiated the Affiliated Regional Groups program to promote relationship-building among bioinformatics groups worldwide. The program offers a structure for mutual recognition and information exchange between the ISCB and other bioinformatics groups, so they can cross-promote news and events.
In the fall of 2002 the first European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) was held in Saarbrücken, Germany, which ISCB supported through student travel fellowships and many ISCB members and leaders attended.
Michael Gribskov,[7] then at UCSD's San Diego Supercomputer department and now at the department of biological sciences at Purdue University, was elected president in 2003. That year ISMB took place in Brisbane, Australia, which was the first time the meeting was held outside North America or Europe. This phase brought many uncertainties for the society when attendance dropped to one half of budgeted expectations due to travel fears and restrictions related to outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS, the start of the war in Iraq, and the location, which broke with the pattern of North American and European venues. Although scientifically successful, the financial losses of ISMB 2003 left ISCB financially unstable for the first time in its history.
In part to reduce ISCB's dependence on ISMB proceeds to fund the society's activities and annual overhead costs, a pilot regional conference was hosted in the US to gauge interest in smaller, localized meetings. In December 2003, the Rocky Mountain Regional Bioinformatics conference, Rocky 1, was launched in Aspen, Colorado. The meeting has been held annually ever since and now attracts attendees from around the world.
In 2004 ISMB, ECCB and Genes, Proteins and Computers VIII (GPCVIII) partnered for a joint conference in Glasgow, Scotland, and included two parallel tracks of original paper presentations for the first time. As ISCB's contract with the journal Bioinformatics was drawing to a close, the society moved to an optional online subscription plan for members since many scientists worked and studied at institutions that already held institutional subscriptions, therefore, negating the earlier need for individual subscriptions for all members.
That year also marks the launch of the ISCB Student Council,[8] which builds opportunities of students and young researchers working in computational biology and bioinformatics. During an internship in Phil Bourne's lab while still a PhD student, Manuel Corpas,[9] now a scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, developed the idea for a student council to give leadership opportunities and encourage networking among student members worldwide, and was elected as its first council chair in 2005.
In 2005, as part of the society's discussions about the role of publications and the society's official journal, accompanied by the advent of open access publishing, the ISCB announced a partnership with the Public Library of Science and launched a new open access journal, PLoS Computational Biology. The journal is intended to emphasize computational methods applied to living systems at all scales, from molecular biology to patient populations and ecosystems, and which offer insight for experimentalists. Past president and past publications committee chair Phil Bourne served as the new publication's editor-in-chief and he remains in that role. The first issue of the new journal coincided with the opening day of ISMB 2005, held in Detroit, Michigan.
In 2006 ISMB again ventured away from the pattern of North American and European venues by taking place in Fortaleza, Brazil, in collaboration with the Brazilian Association for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology or AB3C. Once again, the conference was a scientific success and included new tracks to encourage participation of experimentalists as well as computer scientists. But attendance was approximately half of the previous year, which negatively impacted the society finances that had not yet recovered from the losses of 2003. Membership for the year did not dip as drastically as conference attendance, which provided a strong sign for the successful decoupling of membership enrollment and conference registration.
Burkhard Rost, then professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University and now the Alexander von Humboldt Professor and chair of bioinformatics and computational biology, computational sciences at the Technical University Munich, succeeded Michael Gribskov as president in 2007 and has been reelected twice with a current term expiration set for January 2013. Under his tenure the ISMB/ECCB 2007 conference in Vienna, Austria, chaired by Thomas Lengauer of the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, and co-chaired by Burkhard Rost and Peter Schuster of the University of Vienna, was further expanded to include a total of eight parallel tracks, and the 2007 conference attendance of approximately 1,700 was back on track with expectations. Vienna as a destination and the Austria Center Vienna were both so well received by the conference organizers and attendees alike that it was selected to host the 2011 conference as well, which is a first for the ISMB series that had never before repeated a location.
In 2008 ISMB, chaired by Burkhard Rost and co-chaired by Jill Mesirov of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Michal Linial of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with Thomas Hudson of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research serving as honorary co-chair, returned to Canada, this time Toronto. Attendance was strong, membership enrollment continued to grow, and the Conference on Semantics for Healthcare and Life Sciences, or CSHALS, was created. Reinhard Schneider, group leader of EMBL-Heidelberg and incoming treasurer of ISCB, launched a new portal for the society that greatly enhanced the interactive functionality of the society's web presence for ISCB members, and improved access to information about computational biology and bioinformatics for the scientific community and general public.
In 2009 ISMB/ECCB, chaired by Eugene Myers of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Farm Campus and co-chaired by Marie-France Sagot of INRIA Grenoble, with Gunnar von Heijne of Stockholm University serving as honorary co-chair, was held in Stockholm, Sweden. ISCB membership reached a new high, the student council initiated a regional student groups program to foster interactions between student groups around the world, and ISCB organized the first ISCB Africa ASBCB joint conference on bioinformatics with the African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in Bamako, Mali.
In 2010 ISMB, chaired by Olga Troyanskaya of Princeton University and co-chaired by Jill Mesirov and Michal Linial, was held in Boston, USA. The first ISCB Latin America, chaired by Daniel Almonacid, a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco and Lucia Peixoto, then a PhD candidate and now a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, was held in Montevideo, Uruguay.