The International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA) is in its 9th year. This year's meeting will be held at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, an emerging research university that has invested substantially in the development of research and educational programs in Bioinformatics since 2004. The International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA) will contribute to the rapid dissemination of latest research results and to foster the formation of collaborations between researchers with the multidisciplinary expertise required to analyze the enormous datasets accumulated in modern biological research. The conference content will encompass diverse topics from comparative and functional genomics, to systems biology, to population biology and genetics. ISBRA will provide important formative experiences to graduate students and post-doctoral scholars, helping them to become future leaders in the field. In 2013, when other popular bioinformatics conferences are being held outside the US, ISBRA will provide a valuable opportunity for resource-limited U.S.-based students and PIs to present research and interact with colleagues.
Due to the timing of this award, the award was used, with permission from the Program Officer, to support activities at both ISBRA 2013 and ISBRA 2014. The 9th annual International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research Applications (ISBRA 2013) was held at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Charlotte, NC, USA) on May 20-22, 2013. The five keynote addresses at ISBRA 2013 included talks on RNA structure (Dr. Steve Harvey), computational behavioral ecology (Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf), peptide identification from mass spectrometry (Dr. Bin Ma), gene regulation (Dr. Martha Bulyk), and biological network analysis (Dr. Luonan Chen). The research presented by conference participants was equally diverse. Reflecting current trends in the field, a substantial number of presentations were focused on genomics research, so we have chosen to present two linked supplements in BMC Bioinformatics, and one in BMC Genomics. ISBRA 2013 was attended by 115 participants from the US, Canada, China, southeast Asia, and several European nations. Participants submitted 104 papers and 58 short abstracts. 25 papers were selected to appear in volume 7875 of Springer Verlag's Lecture Notes in the Bioinformatics series, and four of these were revised and published as full length papers in a special supplement to the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. 21 authors of short abstracts were invited to present short talks at the conference, and subsequently to expand on their work and submit full-length papers for these BMC Supplements. These submissions were subject to a rigorous peer review process and 10 manuscripts have been selected for publication. In 2013, 11 student authors were provided travel support by this NSF award. Only student presenters were considered for travel support. The 10th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA2014) was jointly held with the 8th International Frontiers of Algorithmics Workshop (FAW2014) in June 28-30, Zhangjiajie, China. The conference provided a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. ISBRA 2014 received 119 full paper and more than 200 poster submissions. 35 of the full papers were selected for oral presentation at the conference, and for consideration of publication in selected peer-reviewed journals. The conference attracted more than 400 attendees worldwide. We received a total of 15 applications for travel fellowships from researchers at US institutions. We awarded seven of them based on the reviewers' comments, and the applicant’s justification for the need of the fellowship. The awardees included two earlier stage faculty members, one postdoc and three graduate students. They all had a first-authored paper accepted for oral presentation on the conference.
