International Society for Computational Biology

Founding

The Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference series began in 1993. In response to the expansion of the conference, the ISCB was founded in 1997, with a significant part of its remit being to provide a stable financial home for ISMB. The ISCB was legally incorporated in early 1997, with Lawrence Hunter elected as its inaugural president by the members of the founding board of directors, which included Russ Altman, Philip Bourne, David States, and Alfonso Valencia. The ISCB has organized the ISMB conference since 1998.

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.

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 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 organization 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, who then served at the University of California, San Diego's San Diego Supercomputer Center, and is now working at Purdue University's Department of Biological Sciences, 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 of Munich, succeeded Michael Gribskov as president in 2007 and has been re-elected 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.