ISCB Honors David Haussler and Aviv Regev

Each year, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB; http:// www.iscb.org) gives two major awards to leaders and innovators in the field of bioinformatics. The awards committee, composed of current and past directors of the Society and previous award winners, has announced that the 2008 Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award will be given to David Haussler of the University of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, United States, and the 2008 Overton Prize for outstanding achievement in early to midde career will be awarded to Aviv Regev of MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Both award winners are Associate Editors for PLoS Computational Biology, an official journal of ISCB. Søren Brunak, director of the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at Technical University of Denmark and ISCB Awards Committee chair, admitted that the choice of award winners had not been easy. ‘‘These awards are a sign of recognition of achievement not just from ISCB, but from the whole bioinformatics community,’’ he said. ‘‘It is a significant honor to receive one.’’ He highlighted the fact that the 2008 award winners had made major contributions to both the development of algorithms and the application of those algorithms to ‘‘real life’’ biological problems. Both awards will be presented at the Society’s flagship international conference, ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) 2008, where the winners will give Keynote Presentations. The Sixteenth Annual ISMB Conference will take place July 19– 23 in Toronto, Canada.