International Society for Computational Biology

International Society for Computational Biology

Abbreviation	ISCB
Formation	1997 (1997)
Type	Learned society
Headquarters	Bethesda, Maryland, United States[1]
Membership (2016)	~3,400[2]
President	Alfonso Valencia
Key people	Bonnie Berger (Vice President) Terry Gaasterland (Vice President) Thomas Lengauer (Vice President) Christine Orengo (Vice President)
Website	www.iscb.org

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 three official journals: ISCB Community Journal, PLoS Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. The society awards two prizes each year, the Overton Prize^[3] and the ISCB Senior Scientist Awards,^[4][5] and it inducts Fellows, to honor members that have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.

History

Founding

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.

Lawrence Hunter, founder of ISCB.

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, 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, 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 1,700 researchers, and the 2002 ISMB conference in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada welcomed over 1,600 attendees.

Expansion

Michael Gribskov, 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 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.

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 2010 the first ISCB Latin America was held in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Leadership

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 director 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.

Conferences

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 Bioinformatics Conference in 2009, and the bi-annual ISCB Latin America Conference in 2010. ISCB also hosts an annual Great Lake Bioinformatics Conference and partners with RECOMB to produce the Regulatory and Systems Genomics Conference with DREAM Challenges. The ISCB-Asia meeting was started in 2012 and continues to take shape after its last conference in 2014 in Japan in conjunction with GIW.

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 (PSB), the annual international conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (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.

Official journals

• Bioinformatics was the society's journal from 1998–2004, and ISMB Proceedings have been published there since 2001. In 2009 Bioinformatics again became an official journal of ISCB.
• PLoS Computational Biology is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published monthly by the Public Library of Science (PLoS). It became an official journal of ISCB in 2005.
• In 2015, ISCB announced the formation of the ISCB Community Journal, a dedicated channel on the F1000Research online publishing platform, providing members the opportunity to openly publish research articles regardless of their format or perceived impact.^[6][7]

Affiliated organizations

The ISCB has several affiliated organizations (mainly regional), including the European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet), the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC), the African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Japanese Society for Bioinformatics.^[8]

The ISCB is also a founding member of Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training (GOBLET). In collaboration with GOBLET, the ISCB is involved in developing core competencies for different types of bioinformatics trainees; these competencies are being used in the development of new bioinformatics curricula.^[9][10][11]

ISCB Fellows, Officers, and Other Groups

Fellows

The ISCB has elected Fellows since 2009. These distinctions are awarded in honour of outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics.^[12] The inaugural Class was given to previous recipients of the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award; in following years, the ISCB has sought nominations for Fellows from its members. Fellows are traditionally introduced at the ISCB's flagship Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference each year. In February 2016, the ISCB announced that 13 Fellows were selected for the Class of 2016; as of the Class of 2016, 56 Fellows have been elected.^[13]

Current Board of Directors

• Alex Bateman
• Bonnie Berger
• Judith A. Blake
• Manuel Corpas
• Bruno Gaeta
• Paul Horton
• Janet Kelso
• Thomas Lengauer
• Fran Lewitter
• Jill P. Mesirov
• Predrag Radivojac
• Anna Tramontano
• Alfonso Valencia
• Lonnie R. Welch
• Yana Bromberg
• Francisco De La Vega
• Anupama Jigisha
• Francisco Melo Ledermann
• Yves Moreau
• Nicola Mulder
• Christine Orengo
• Reinhard Schneider
• Burkhard Rost
• Martin Vingron

Past Presidents

• Burkhard Rost 2007-2014
• Russ Altman 2000-2002
• Philip Bourne 2002-2003
• Michael Gribskov 2003-2007
• Lawrence Hunter 1997-2000

References