2010 ISCB Overton Prize Awarded to Steven E. Brenner

Abstract

Each year the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB; http://www.iscb.org) honors a young scientist who has already achieved a significant and lasting impact on our field. The ISCB Awards Committee, comprised of current and former directors of the society and chaired by Soren Brunak, director of the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark, has announced that the recipient of the 2010 ISCB Overton Prize is Steven E. Brenner of the University of California, Berkeley, California, United States (Image 1). Image 1. Steven E. Brenner. Additionally, the 2010 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award goes to Chris Sander of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, US. Each of these awards are recognized well beyond the borders of the discipline of bioinformatics or computational biology as honoring excellence in science. Brunak points out some interesting connections between this year's award winners: “Both Sander and Brenner started out in structural bioinformatics and made distinguished contributions to the analysis of protein structure before moving into genomics-based research and a more translational approach to bioinformatics.” Both honorees will be presented with their awards at the ISCB's 18th annual international conference, Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB; http://www.iscb.org/ismb2010), where Brenner will give the opening keynote lecture and Sander will speak on the second day. ISMB 2010 will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, US, July 11–13, 2010. This article features Steven E. Brenner as recipient of the Overton Prize; a future article will highlight Chris Sander's accomplishments that have earned him ISCB's Senior Scientist Award.