News

SDSC's Phil Bourne is chairing the scientific program committee of the 14 th Annual Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology ( ISMB 2006) in Fortaleza , Brazil, August 6-10, with S?ren Brunak of the University of Denmark serving as co-chair. ISMB is the annual conference of the International Society for Computational Biology ( ISCB), a worldwide membership society of bioinformaticians that moved its headquarters from Stanford University to SDSC under Bourne's leadership as ISCB President in 2002. Both the conference and the society have experienced explosive growth since 2000 when SDSC hosted this conference with record breaking attendance. SDSC provides infrastructure to the ISCB and ISMB in the way of web and technical support, office space and various other services.

The 2006 conference is especially exciting for the line up of keynote speakers, including three Nobel Laureates, two ISCB award winners, and three other highly accomplished scientists. But the 67 peer-reviewed paper presentations selected from among 404 submissions are where the bulk of Bourne's effort is most evident. He also was instrumental in bringing to fruition the new PLoS Track of oral abstracts showcasing an additional 23 talks selected from 218 submissions of work that is novel, applied, motivating to hear about, and expands the subject areas that computational biologists traditionally have addressed. A poster session including over 500 peer-reviewed posters is also an essential element of the annual conference, and a call for late breaking posters remains open until July 15 th for those who would still like to submit their research results.

Registration for ISMB 2006 will remain open up to and through the conference dates, but anyone wishing to register should do so immediately in order to also secure favorable flights to Brazil and a Brazilian entry visa if holding a US passport (entry visa is required for several countries so check with the Brazilian consulate in your home country). Go to the conference website at www.iscb.org/ismb2006 for all information, including links to a detailed agenda, paper, poster and technical demonstration abstracts, and more.

About ISMB
Lawrence Hunter, Director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, organized the first Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) in 1993 while working as a programmer at the US National Library of Medicine. Including 2006, the annual conference has since been held in nine countries on four continents during its 14 year history. The first conference drew 201 participants, and growth through the years has resulted in as many as 2136 delegates from over 40 countries in recent years. ISMB has earned a reputation as the world's largest and most established bioinformatics conference, and is most often considered a ?must attend? event among annual attendees. A complete listing of past ISMB conferences as well as related bioinformatics conferences can be reviewed at http://www.iscb.org/conferences_past.shtml.

About ISCB
The ISCB a scholarly society dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of living systems through computation. Founded in 1997, the ISCB communicates the significance of our science to the larger scientific community, governments, and the public at large. The ISCB serves a global membership by impacting government and scientific policies, providing high quality publications and meetings, and through distribution of valuable information about training, education, employment and relevant news from related fields. The society counts nearly 2000 members from academia, industry, government and graduate students/post doctoral researchers. The official journal of the ISCB is PLoS Computational Biology , an online open access publication freely available to everyone everywhere. More about the ISCB can be found at www.iscb.org.

About Phil Bourne
Philip E. Bourne PhD is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, Co-director of the Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute and the Keck Graduate Institute. He is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology and Founding Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology . Bourne leads the Structural Bioinformatics group in the Sciences R&D Division at the San Diego Supercomputer Center .