Webb Miller and Trey Ideker To Receive Top International Bioinformatics Awards for 2009 from the International Society for Computational Biology

Each year, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB; http:// www.iscb.org) makes two major awards to recognize excellence in the field of bioinformatics. The ISCB Awards Committee, composed of current and past directors of the Society and previous award winners, has announced that the 2009 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award will be given to Webb Miller (Image 1) of The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America (USA), and the 2009 ISCB Overton Prize for outstanding achievement in earlyto mid-career will be awarded to Trey Ideker (Image 2) of the University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA, who serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for PLoS Computational Biology. These awards represent the highest tribute and recognition of scientific excellence within the bioinformatics community, and they are seen as honors well beyond the boundaries of the discipline. Both 2009 award winners started their careers in basic computer science, but since moving into bioinformatics they have made important contributions to biological understanding as well as to algorithm design. Both awards will be presented at the Society’s flagship international conference, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), where the winners will give keynote presentations. In 2009, the (seventeenth) annual ISMB will be held in conjunction with the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) for the third time; ISMB/ ECCB 2009 will take place in Stockholm, Sweden, from June 27 through July 2. Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award: Webb Miller