ISCB Congratulates and Introduces the 2016 Class of Fellows!
The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is pleased to announce the Fellows Class of 2016. Fellow status is given to ISCB members that have distinguished themselves through exceptional contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. The ISCB Fellows program began in 2009, and 56 members have been conferred with this status to date. 13 Fellows have been selected for this year’s class, and they will be introduced at ISMB 2016 in Orlando, Florida in July.
Helen Berman Distinguished Professor / Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers University, USA. For her roles in creating and leading the Protein Data Bank and Nucleic Acids Database, her innovations in computational biology including methods and standards, as well as her distinguished contributions to structural biology.
Steven E. Brenner Professor, Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, USA. For his significant research contributions to protein analysis and genetics, and notable organizational service to the field, especially through CAGI and DREAM competitions.
Dan Gusfield Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, USA. For his notable contributions to computational biology, particularly his algorithmic work on building evolutionary trees, molecular sequence analysis, optimization problems in population genetics, RNA folding, and integer programming in biology.
Barry Honig Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, USA. For his seminal contributions to protein structure prediction and molecular electrostatics, and his more recent work on protein function prediction, protein-DNA recognition, and cell-cell adhesion.
Janet Kelso Group Leader, Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. For her excellence in pursuing novel research in computational genomics and her devoted scientific service to the global community through leadership roles in ISCB and bioinformatics journals, support for bioinformatics education, and involvement in the global development of bioinformatics.
Michal Linial Professor, Biological Chemistry / Director, Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology / Director, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. For her pioneering work on automatic classification of protein sequences and function prediction, for bringing Bayesian networks and compressed sensing to our community for expression data analysis, and for her above-and-beyond service and numerous contributions to ISCB.
Christine Orengo Professor, Division of Biosciences, University College London, UK. For her outstanding contributions to protein structure classification in the CATH resource, the development of novel robust algorithms to determine structural and functional relationships between proteins, and her numerous contributions to ISCB.
Aviv Regev Core Member, Broad Institute, and Associate Professor, Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. For her outstanding research in systems biology, particularly her work on molecular circuitry, gene regulation, and, more recently, cancer genomics.
Lincoln Stein Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, and Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Canada. For his roles in the formative consortia of computational biology, including the Human Genome Project, HapMap, Reactome, BioPerl, Wormbase, co-leading bioinformatics for ModEncode, and developing and leading GMOD.
Sarah Teichmann Group Leader, European Molecular Biology Laboratory - European Bioinformatics Institute, UK. For her work on elucidating the domain characteristics of prokaryotic proteins, introducing graph theory to represent protein domain combinations as networks, developing predictive models for transcription factor-DNA interactions in gene regulation, and statistical methods for single-cell transcriptomics, as well as her service on numerous editorial boards and conference committees.
Anna Tramontano Chair Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy. For being a world leader in the field of bioinformatics, in particular protein structure prediction and analysis, and making numerous contributions to bioinformatics research, ISCB leadership, and education.
Shoshana J. Wodak Professor, Visiting Group Leader, Vlaamse Institute of Biotechnology, Structural Biology Research Center, Free University of Brussels, Brussels, Belgium. For her pioneering work on docking algorithms for the prediction of protein-protein interactions and her role on the management committee of CAPRI (Criticial Assessment of Predicted Interactions), a community-wide initiative on evaluating methods for the prediction of protein interactions, on which she has served since 2001.
Haim Wolfson Professor, Department of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Israel. For pioneering the introduction of Computer Vision motivated 3D pattern discovery algorithms into computational structural biology, co-developing the geometric hashing methodology, and developing highly efficient algorithms for protein structural alignment, protein-protein docking, binding site comparison, and integrative modeling of large multi-molecular assemblies.
Short bibliographical articles profiling the 2016 Class of Fellows will be available in the ISMB 2016 focus issue of the ISCB newsletter later this year, as well as the ISCB Society Pages in PLOS Computational Biology, OUP Bioinformatics, and ISCB Community Journal hosted by F1000.
