2018 outstanding contributions to ISCB award: Russ Altman

The Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award was introduced in 2015 to recognize Society members who have made lasting and beneficial contributions through their leadership, service, and educational work, or a combination of these areas. Russ Altman (Image 1), Kenneth Fong Professor and Professor of Bioengineering, of Genetics, of Medicine (General Medicine Discipline), of Biomedical Data Science, and, by courtesy, of Computer Science, is the 2018 winner of the Outstanding Contributions to ISCB Award and will be recognized at the 2018 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting in Chicago, Illinois, being held on July 6–10, 2018. Altman’s years of dedicated service to ISCB began when he attended the very first ISMB meeting in 1993. As a brand new faculty member, he remembered how he felt at home at ISMB, surrounded by a community of scientists also interested in computational biology and bioinformatics. Altman’s enthusiasm at this first ISMB meeting led him to help organize the next ISMB meeting. He recalled, “It became clear that there was no obvious ‘host’ for ISMB 1994, so I volunteered to host it at Stanford, where we had a lovely meeting with a couple of hundred people. We had some extra money after paying our bills, so we wanted to send the money to wherever ISMB 1995 was going to be (UK). For the first few years, this is how ISMB worked—the organizers from one year would send the leftover funds as a seed for the next ISMB. There was no organization, and as the size of the leftover check increased, we started getting nervous and realized we needed to create a legal entity.” ISCB was born at ISMB 1997 in Halkidiki, Greece, where organizers of former ISMB meetings and others sat at dinner on the beach and planned the society and figured out how to incorporate it. Altman has warm recollections of that historic gathering and said, “There are pictures of that great dinner and group, and I treasure the memory of that meeting”. Altman has enjoyed serving ISCB at all levels since its inception, from work on the Publications Committee and as a conference organizer to his tenure on the ISCB Board of Directors (1997–2005) and as ISCB President (2002–2005). Altman’s early work on the Publications