Leadership Structure
Name Email Institution Position Country Position
Douglas Pires douglas.pires@unimelb.edu.au University of Melbourne PI AU Co-chair
Gonzalo Parra parra.gonzalo@gmail.com Barcelona Supercomputing center PI ES Co-chair
Alexey Porollo Alexey.Porollo@cchmc.org Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center PI US Track Editor
Anna Marabotti amarabotti@unisa.it University of Salerno PI IT Track Editor
Ray Arjun rayarjun@gmail.com Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) PI IN Track Editor
Alexander Monzon monzon.alexander@gmail.com Padova University PI IT Track Editor
Javier Alfaro javier.alfaro@proteogenomics.ca International Center for Cancer Vaccine Science (University of Gdansk) PI Canada Track Editor
Lam Su Datt sudatt@ukm.edu.my Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia PI Malaysia Track Editor and Webinar Coordinator
Stephen Yi Stephen.yi@austin.utexas.edu The University of Texas at Austin PI US Webinar Coordinator
Daniel Buchan daniel.buchan@ucl.ac.uk UCL PI UK Track Editor and Training Coordinator
Rafaela Ferreira rafaelasalgadoferreira@gmail.com Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais PI Brazil Track Editor
Chris Kieslich kieslich@auburn.edu Auburn University PI US Track Editor and Training Coordinator
Stuart MacGowan s.macgowan@dundee.ac.uk University of Dundee PI UK Track Editor and Comms Coordinator
Ravinder Abrol ravinder.abrol@csun.edu California State University PI US Track Editor and Hackaton Coordinator
Carlos Rodrigues carlosmr12@gmail.com CSIRO PI AU Training Coordinator and Hackaton Coordinator + Comms
Frances Pearl F.Pearl@sussex.ac.uk University of Sussex PI UK Track Editor & X-meeting/Brazil
Sabrina Azevedo sabrina@ufv.br Universidade Federal de Viçosa PI Brazil Track Editor
Sandro Izidoro sandroizidoro@unifei.edu.br Universidade Federal de Itajubá PI Brazil Track Editor
Serena Rosignoli srosignoli@unimore.it Unimore - University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Postdoc Italy Webinars organiser
Neeladri Sen n.sen@ucl.ac.uk University College London Postdoc UK Webinars
organiser

Activities Over the Last Year
Summary of 2024:
ISMB was held in Montreal, Canada. This time the 3DSIG keynote lectures were delivered by Prof. Dame Janet Thornton (EBI, UK) and Prof. Yana Bromberg (Emory University, USA).
The same procedure as for 3DSIG 2023 was followed to fill the 2 days programme with selected talks.

Activities outside of ISMB:
ISCB Academy webinar: We had only 1 of these webinars this year

• ISCB Academy webinar: Dr. R. Gonzalo Parra “Local Frustration Conservation in Protein Families: A proxy to understand protein evolution, dynamics and function”. April 3, 2024 at 10:00 AM EDT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PQUOCxU_OE&ab_channel=ISCB


As in 2023, in 2024, 3DSIG has collaborated with the 3DBioinfo Community from Elixir and the ISCB Student Council to organize a webinar series on different Structural Bioinformatics topics. The webinars are organised by Dr. Gonzalo Parra, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and Dr. Neeladri Sen, University College London.

These webinars have been organized since Jan 2024:
Oct 8, 2024, 18:00 CET
Xingyue Guan, Nanjing University, China
“Predicting protein conformational motions using energetic frustration analysis and AlphaFold2”
Dr. Lauren Porter, National Institute of Health, USA
“Predicting protein fold switching with AlphaFold and other approaches”
https://youtu.be/keoBeTHvruM

Sept 10, 2024 18:00 CET
Prof. Bohdan Schneider; Institute of Biotechnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences
“Improving validation of nucleic acid structures - Annotation and validation of nucleic acid structures”
Dr. Markéta Soltysová, Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences
“Structural studies of bacterial transcriptional repressors of the SorC protein family”
https://youtu.be/No5xNfWEenQ

June 18, 2024, 18:00 CET
Dr Nicola Bordin, University College London, UK
“The Encyclopedia of Domains”
Prof. Arne Elofsson, Stockholm University, Sweden
“Towards a complete structural map of the human proteome”
https://youtu.be/oLg3mDILmpo

May 7, 2024, 18:00 CET
Dr. Michael Heizinger, Technical University Munich, Germany
”ProstT5: Bilingual Language Model for Protein Sequence and Structure”
Celine Marquet, Technical University Munich, Germany
“Protein Embeddings Predict Binding Residues in Disordered Regions”
https://youtu.be/T8Y2opAfBWY

April 9, 2024, 18:00 CET
Dr. Antonia Mey, University of Edinburgh, UK
“SILVR: Conditioning Diffusion Models for Fragment-Based Small Molecule Generation”
Dr. Mathilde Goullieux, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland
“Two-Step Covalent Docking with Attracting Cavities”
https://youtu.be/0Gy3TS-hGd4

March 12, 2024, 17:00 CET
Dr. Joe Watson, University of Washington, USA
“De novo antibody design with RFdiffusion”
Serena Rosignoli, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
“From AlphaFold to PyMOL: Enabling seamless access to Structural Bioinformatics Tools”
https://youtu.be/nRUdYYBaq_4

Collaboration between 3DSIG and national societies.
In June 2024, for the first time, a 3DSIG session was held in collaboration with the Brazilian Association for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (AB3C) during its annual bioinformatics conference: X-meeting (https://x-meeting.com/events/2024). The 3DSIG organisation was involved in the selection of the structural bioinformatics programme and selection of best presentation awards, creating a dedicated forum for the structural community in the conference.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
Gender representation: We do not have access to any information relative to the distribution of sex or self-defined gender of participants. We strive to have a balance in terms of sex of keynotes at the level priorities of invitations. This year we decided to have two women as keynotes to balance past years like 2022 when none of the female (description of sex) invited speakers we able to accept our invitation.

Leadership Structure
In the past we have had a loose organizing committee with one or two people leading the detailed coordination with support from the others. We met online monthly from March 2024 until ISMB. Since our time slot within the conference has expanded significantly in the past year or two, the workload has increased for planning and running the session and selecting and recruiting panelists and speakers. This year we are expanding the core team to support the different parts of the COSI session.

Activities Over the Last Year
Our main focus was our (first ever full day) session at ISMB. We had talks, panels, and fruitful group discussions on topics relevant to core members.

One of the highlights (and most well-attended) may have been the panel on AI in cores. We had a diverse panel with people with wide ranging experience using AI for various tasks: Dexter Pratt, Nancy Li, Michelle Brazas, and Dukka KC. The panelists led an interesting and wide-ranging discussion on topics such as: training users on how to use AI and LLMs, using generative AI to help develop training materials, incorporating AI chat agents into web interfaces, how to set up an infrastructure so that users can access and query various models on their own without too much hassle, open source vs. commercial models, etc. We all captured this information to explore or incorporate in our daily jobs.

As far as talks go, some highlights follow. Swapnil Sawant from Phoenix Bioinformatics spoke about the comprehensive modernization of TAIR (the arabidopsis information resource, a website and database with 600k users globally). They were starting with legacy technology more than 20 years old, where changes took a long time and maintenance costs were high. By keeping the interface pretty similar and moving to a new technology platform, they were able to improve performance a lot for users and make things easier and cheaper to maintain.
Francesco Lescai gave an excellent introduction and overview about nextflow, the problems it helps solve for cores, gave us a feel for what it looks like, and discussed the nf-core community.

Patricia Carvajal Lopez spoke about the Bioinformatics core facility competency framework, an effort to better define the role of a bioinformatics core facility scientist at three different levels plus a managerial level using competencies and knowledge, skills, and attributes.
We also had our usual breakout group discussion, where attendees suggest topics and we break into groups to discuss them. This approach allows people to share knowledge more freely and make connections with other people interested in (or struggling with) the same topics as them. Our breakout group topics were Pipelines, Cost recovery and management, and Managing big data. Some topics discussed by each group are detailed below:

Pipelines – nextflow was quite popular, but they discussed how the transition to using a workflow tool does require some time and effort. You also must compare and evaluate how this new approach compares to what you have done before.

Cost recovery models and management – basically it’s challenging. Some cores use a combination of techniques or approaches. Some charge by the hour, but it’s not really fair to clients who are the first to try a new type of project. Different analysts also may take different amounts of time on the same type of project. There is also a fixed cost model for a particular type of project, but there is a risk that you estimate the cost wrong. Some people estimate a minimum number of hours required and if the project goes over, then an additional discussion is needed with the collaborator.

Managing big data – What data actually DOES need to be saved, and what data needs to be made FAIR? What data can you upload to repositories for longer term storage? In some groups, every project actually has a data management plan, but the compliance with that plan is not always there. iRODs was mentioned as a solution, but it wasn’t an option for other reasons so that group went with a second choice, which was more DIY. Starfish was mentioned as a commercial solution. Some places have a data steward, which is a role helping guide people through what metadata they need, what they should store where (locally or cloud) and for how long, etc.

Besides our session at ISMB, many of us have been participating in a working group to better define career roles for people working in bioinformatics cores (as presented by Patricia Carvajal Lopez at the conference). We have written a framework, surveyed people in cores, and are working on a manuscript. This will help to formalize our career paths and provide guidance to other people starting or working in cores.

Generally, our members interact through our slack and mailing list to get advice, find out how other people handle particular situations, share job postings, etc.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
We have been lucky enough to be (at least for a while now) organized by a group that is itself represented by different groups in a number of ways - gender, geography, country of origin, and work role. Since people working in cores tend to come from all different backgrounds, we seem to be above average within the conference at identifying a diverse group of people to participate in talks and panels. Our selection of talks is currently based on the relevance of the topic to our audience, but our speakers have luckily tended to be pretty diverse. We offer complimentary registration for our speakers and an honorarium to our panelists, which might help some people attend who might not be able to otherwise. Since cores work in an interdisciplinary field, we also tend to try to be pretty inclusive in terms of both topic areas and people’s backgrounds. The breakout sessions also allow for a more comfortable means of sharing of information for people who don’t necessarily want to give a talk or even sit on a panel, but still might have a lot of wisdom and insight to share. We have not been able to really afford sponsoring travel fellowships for students, which is a potential area of growth - it’s a little different for our COSI since we are more of a professional-oriented group. Another potential area of growth for us might be to examine our keynote speaker selection process. We have had quite a run of male keynote speakers, for example, and it might be good to examine how we are identifying those speakers to ensure we aren’t passing people over for the opportunity.

Leadership Structure
General Chairs
Helena Jambor, TU Dresden, Germany
Michael Krone, University of Tübingen, Germany
Jan Byška, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Website Chair
Kari Lavikka, University of Helsinki, Finland
Publicity Chair
Jen Rogers, University of Utah, USA
BioVis COSI @ ISMB 2023 Abstracts Chairs
Katarína Furmanová, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Aditeya Pandey, Regeneron Genetics Center, United States
Qianwen Wang, Harvard University, USA
ISMB Liaison Chairs
Jim Procter, University of Dundee, UK
BioVis Workshop @ IEEE VIS 2022 Chairs
Barbora Kozlikova, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Daniel Jönsson, Linköping University, Sweden
Renata Raidou, TU Wien, Austria
Sean O’Donoghue, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Sydney
Steering Committee
Jan Aerts, KU Leuven and U Hasselt, Belgium
G. Elisabeta Marai, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Kay Nieselt, University of Tübingen, Germany
Jim Procter, University of Dundee, UK
Marc Streit, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Cagatay Turkay, University of Warwick, UK
Honored Members
Michel Westenberg, (passed away April 2021) Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Activities Over the Last Year
The BioVis 2023 main event at ISMB hosted two distinguished keynote speakers. Anna Vilanova (TU Eindhoven, NL) examined how accurate analytical models, tailored visual encodings, and carefully designed interactive visualisations allow effective analysis of complex data. Marc Baaden (IBPC Paris, CNRS FR) reviewed the origins of the visual representations, technologies, and software tools used today for molecular graphics and explored its role in teaching, education, science communication, and research. Furthermore, there were 4 long talks, 8 short talks, and 14 posters presented by authors from all over the world. Most notably, Kari Lavikka et al. (University of Helsinki, Finland) received the Best Abstract award for their submission on the development and application of Jellyfish plots in tumour dynamics. Felix Offensperger et al. (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany) received the Best Poster award for their work on visualizing (differential) expression patterns with fuzzy concepts using FlowSets diagrams. Finally, Sean O’Donoghue et al. (CSIRO, U. Sydney, Garvan & UNSW, Australia) received the Test of Time award for their work on the Molecular Control Toolkit, which was originally presented at BioVis 2013.
Another important meeting was the BioVis Workshop @ IEEE VIS 2023. This event serves as a platform for visualization researchers to increase the impact of visualization approaches in biology and medicine. Prior to the workshop, we invited researchers to participate in a visualisation challenge. This year's topic was based on a study recently published in Cancer Cell by the ProCan® team. The tasks were to (1) create an easy-to-understand visualization of peptide and protein intensities by including phenotypic information about tissue and cancer types; (2) design an intuitive visualization that seamlessly connects drug responses to their respective proteins and cell lines or (3) create an interactive tool to visualise drug response data across cell lines in relation to their proteomic data. A total of 3 submissions were evaluated by a jury, and each gave a talk during the workshop. The submission by Brich et al. (University of Tübingen, Germany) was awarded as the winner of the contest. In addition, we invited Drew Berry as the keynote speaker. He presented wehi.tv’s latest productions that generate dynamic, real-time organelle-scale models for science communication and education.

Finally, we continued the online BioVis meetup series, albeit at a reduced frequency, as our focus this year was to fully engage and ramp up the in-person BioVis events rather than virtual seminars. Two meetups have taken place, one discussing visualizations for communicating complex research with the information graphics team of Nature, and one on communicating Scientific Concepts Through Art. We are planning to continue the virtual meetup series with 3-5 seminars per year.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
BioVis strives to achieve equity and diversity both in its management and operational structures. The BioVis COSI is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive community. We recognize that diverse perspectives and experiences are critical for advancing science and fostering innovation. We therefore welcome and encourage participation from individuals of all backgrounds and identities, and this was reflected in the diverse participation of scientists hailing from across the world.
We are committed to creating a conference environment that is welcoming, respectful, and inclusive for all attendees. We have ensured that participation and organisation were balanced with respect to junior and senior members of our community and also intentionally gender-balanced the general chairs, keynotes, as well as talks selected from abstracts.
We recognize that equity, diversity, and inclusion are ongoing efforts, and we will work to continuously improve our practices and policies to better support and promote EDI.

Leadership Structure
COSI representative to committee: Robert Hoehndorf
COSI Alternate representative: Núria Queralt Rosinach
COSI Proceedings Liaison: Maxat Kulmanov
COSI Track Chair(s): Tiffany Callahan and Augustin Luna
COSI Programming Coordinator for ISCBacademy: Maxat Kulmanov

Activities Over the Last Year
Bio-Ontologies (#bioontologies; http://www.bio-ontologies.org.uk/) is an ISMB Community of Special Interest (COSI) that covers the latest and most innovative research in the application of ontologies and the organization, presentation, and dissemination of knowledge in biomedicine and the life sciences.

Bio-Ontologies celebrated its 27th year at ISMB 2024, held in-person in Montréal, Canada on July 12-16, 2024. The Bio-Ontologies is one of the oldest COSIs and provides a vibrant environment for reporting novel methods, exchanging knowledge and sharing experiences on the construction and application of ontologies and other semantic artifacts such as knowledge graphs in the life sciences. The COSI run track offers a constructive environment to nurture discussion of innovative and scientifically sound work that ranges from preliminary to completed, from both young and experienced investigators alike. Bio-Ontologies participants also benefit from a strongly interdisciplinary setting, where ISMB attendees intermingle with members from American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the W3C’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Community Group (HCLSCG), and the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) thereby increasing impact through new collaborations and broader dissemination. Furthermore, the COSI participates in the ISCBAcademy running two webinars every year to both provide to junior and senior researchers another platform for dissemination, instruction and discussion on current topics of interest in academia, and to provide the opportunity to students and junior researchers to chair the session to foster their involvement, empowerment and networking within the community. We aim at broadening the range of talks by inviting industry speakers with current interesting topics for the bio-ontologies community.

Day 1 of the Bio-ontologies track included a keynote delivered by Dr. Mayla Boguslav on “Learning from our collective scientific ignorance: How can ontologies help us determine what isn't yet?” where she shared her findings on the importance of representing and exploiting the scientific ignorome through ontologies for more impactful and precise knowledge discovery. She described her approach based on building an Ignorance-base with the research goals of facilitating an accessible, transparent and efficient Science and demonstrated how it can enhance the scientific method. This talk drew a sizable in-person and online crowd and elicited a lively discussion. Bio-ontologies also featured many exciting talks. The day featured 5 talks covering the importance of data quality and biases caused by under-studied genes/diseases and the impact on knowledge graph embedding based link prediction and gene function prediction. It also included analyses that leveraged ontologies to variant prioritization with multiple ontologies, harmonizing enzymatic nomenclature and its significance for antibiotic resistance, and the use of knowledge graphs and LLMs for investigating food composition and cancer prevention. This day also featured a proceedings talk, which presented a novel method based on the integration of background knowledge for automatic detection of inconsistencies in gene ontology annotation.

Day 2 of the Bio-ontologies track included a keynote delivered by Dr. Karin Slater on “Exploring Multiple Perspectives for Associative Knowledgebases” where she discussed the opportunities and challenges around associative databases and demonstrated her new approach for learning patient and public priorities from social media data. Bio-ontologies featured 6 exciting talks on NLP-based extraction of clinical significance for drug-gene interactions from FDA labels, our current knowledge status on protein function, microbial and human dataset harmonization for investigating the role of the gut microbiome in disease, using ontologies to make machine-readable bioassay protocols, and the use of knowledge graphs in cancer genomics This day also had a proceedings talk on ontology-based protein function prediction. The day closed with an awards session and a brief plenary discussion which focused on ways to expand the Bio-Ontologies community and ways to engage existing community members through novel community-based tasks, inviting relevant external speakers for ISCB webinars, and the development of new social media-based avenues for communication.

The COSI sessions also had a social media impact on Twitter and on Slack (69 members currently registered on the bio-ontologies workspace) and our LinkedIn group (Bio-Ontologies; https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13998260/), which currently has 117 members, which represent both academic and industry settings.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
Our efforts at ISMB:

Gender representation: Bio-Ontologies COSI did not ask participants about the gender they identify with. One presenter requested to be identified as female.

World research representation: Bio-Ontology COSI presenters were from Europe, Asia, North America, Oceania. In 2024, no presenters from Africa, South America, or Antarctica were present.

Leadership Structure
The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), an all-volunteer organization that is responsible for BOSC, is led by an elected Board that currently includes 9 members (https://www.open-bio.org/board/), with Peter Cock as President, Nomi Harris as Vice-President, and Heather Wiencko as Treasurer.

BOSC (https://www.open-bio.org/events/bosc-2025/) continues to be chaired by Nomi Harris, who has chaired or co-chaired the meeting since 2010. For 2025, our organizing committee includes 8 people. Newly added is Tazro Ohta of Chiba University.

Activities Over the Last Year
OBF accomplishments over the past year include:
- OBF Event Fellowships: In 2024, 10 people were awarded funds to attend in-person or virtual events related to open science, including conferences such as Asia & Pacific Bioinformatics Joint Conference 2024, The 1st Congress by The Spanish Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, The 23rd European Conference on Computational Biology ECCB2024 and Cancer Genomics and Transcriptomics 2024.
- OBF/BOSC sponsored one ISCBacademy talk: Gemma Turon, 2024-03-05, “Ersilia, open source AI/ML for (antimicrobial) drug discovery”.
- OBF newsletters went out in March and September 2024: https://github.com/OBF/newsletter/tree/master/newsletters. We welcome suggestions from the community about relevant content (related to open source / open science) to include in future issues.
- OBF and BOSC remain very active on social media. There were 25 posts on our blog (open-bio.org/blog/) as well as emails to our subscribers, posts on LinkedIn and Bluesky, and messages in public Slack channels. As of January 6, 2025, OBF has 963 followers on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/openbio.bsky.social).

BOSC accomplishments over the past year include:
- BOSC 2024, the 25th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, was part of ISMB 2024 in Montréal, Canada, and online. Approximately 200 people participated in BOSC sessions.
- BOSC 2024 covered a wide range of topics in open science and open source bioinformatics, including Data Analysis, Open Data, Visualization, Developer Tools and Libraries, Standards and Frameworks for Open Science, and Open AI/ML.
- The keynote speakers were Mélanie Courtot on "The Data Shows We Need Better Data" and Andrew Su on "Open Data, Knowledge Graphs, and Large Language Models."
- In addition to the two keynotes, BOSC 2024 included 36 talks chosen from submitted abstracts and 23 posters presented in person or online. The complete lists of talks and posters can be found at www.open-bio.org/events/bosc-2024/bosc-2024-schedule.
- A panel discussion, "Open Source AI/ML: A Game Changer for Bioinformatics?”, included Lawrence Hunter and Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou along with the two keynote speakers as panelists.
- Immediately following BOSC, the 2024 CollaborationFest (CoFest) was held on the campus of Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). First launched in 2010, CoFest is a collaborative work event held yearly before or after BOSC. This year’s CoFest included 42 participants who worked together on 10 projects.
- Our report about BOSC 2024 can be found at https://f1000research.com/articles/13-1100
- As of January 6, 2025, the BOSC group on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14344023/) has 385 members. On Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/bosc.bsky.social), BOSC has 351 followers. The BOSC Slack workspace has 419 members.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
- The OBF Event Fellowship program is aimed at improving diversity at events related to open science or open-source bioinformatics by helping to make events financially accessible to people from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in these fields. Originally called the OBF Travel Fellowship, the program was extended in 2020 to cover costs associated with participating in online events such as virtual conference fees, headsets, high speed internet, etc. (https://www.open-bio.org/event-awards/)..
- As in previous years, BOSC prioritized its time and funds to ensure our meeting was more diverse and inclusive. Anyone who submitted an abstract to BOSC could request fee assistance by checking a box on the submission form. Additionally, participants were encouraged to apply for OBF Event Fellowships. In 2024, 14 people (13 from underrepresented groups) were granted free registration thanks to a combination of registration fee waivers and OBF Event Fellowships (funded by sponsorships).
- Our keynote speaker selection process is designed to be inclusive and transparent. In the first phase, we invite as broad a community as possible to nominate potential speakers. After that, we apply our Invited Speaker Rubric (https://github.com/OBF/bosc_materials/blob/master/invited-speaker-process.md) to narrow down the list of candidates and solicit community feedback. This process has helped us choose keynote speakers who represent a diversity of backgrounds and ideas. In the past decade, BOSC has had 20 keynote speakers. 11 were women or non-binary people; 7 were non-white.
- We offer honoraria to our keynote speakers, in recognition of the fact that not all researchers are privileged to be able to donate their time. Those who do not want to accept honoraria were given the option to donate it back to help support future EDI endeavors. We see the honorarium program as one aspect to our inclusiveness in choosing keynote speakers, which we are still striving to improve.
- The BOSC Organizing Committee and Review Committee are diverse, with wide representation from people of different ethnicities and geographical locations. We hope to continue making both of these committees, as well as BOSC participation in general, even more representative of the whole world, particularly the global south.
- A page on our website (https://www.open-bio.org/bosc-dei/) provides more information about how BOSC has supported diversity, inclusion and accessibility (also known as DEI or EDI).

Leadership Structure
CAMDA is co-chaired by Wenzhong Xiao (Harvard/Stanford), Joaquin Dopazo (Spanish Health Ministry), David Kreil (Vienna), and Pawel Labaj (Jagiellonian University, Poland).
The chairs are supported by a Scientific Committee which features a good mix of senior established researchers like Wolfgang Huber and young talent in the field.
With novel challenges appearing in CAMDA portfolio of competition topics every year we take pride to involve a diverse group young and talented researchers.

Activities Over the Last Year
The main activity of the COSI is the preparation and running of competitions throughout the year, culminating in discussions at the CAMDA conference in ISMB, followed by a special proceedings volume.
The competition challenges for CAMDA 2024 were advertised early in the year and included:
- The Synthetic Clinical Health Records Challenge provides a rich set of highly realistic Electronic Health Records (EHR) tracing the diagnosis trajectories of diabetic patients, created with dual-adversarial auto-encoders trained on data from 1.2 million real patients in the Population Health Database of the Andalusian Ministry of Health. Predict relevant diabetes endpoints like blindness or cardiopathy from past diagnosis trajectories!
- The Anti-Microbial Resistance Prediction Challenge features clinical isolates sequences. Predict resistance genes/markers and identify resistant bacteria!
- The Gut Microbiome based Health Index Challenge features hundreds of WMS based taxonomic and functional profiles of healthy and unhealthy individuals. Take advantage of the Theater of Activity concept and compete already existing taxonomy based metrics!
The scientific program included keynotes by leading researchers in the field: Dr Catherine Lozupone, discussing Exploring drivers of gut microbiome compositional differences in disease and mechanistic pathways to recovery using big data, and Dr Andrey Rzhetsky presenting a Computational dissection of complex human disease. Also already for a few years we invite a representative of the local scientific community. In 2024 we had an opportunity to learn more about prediction in microbiome science by Jesse Shapiro (McGill University, Montreal, Canada).The last session featured the CAMDA Trophy Ceremony with the first prize going to Patrick Smyth from National Microbiology Laboratory Canada. The second prize went to Zuzanna Karwowska from Małopolska Centre of Biotechnology, Krakow, Poland, and the third prize to Nelly Selem Mojica, CCM UNAM Mexico. The competition was tight, and a an honourable mention went to Owen Visser, University of Florida, U.S.A. and Jaime Salvador López Viveros, CCM UNAM Mexico.
At CAMDA, after critical assessment and discussion during the conference, participants are invited to submit a full manuscript incorporating new insights from the meeting for review and publication in the CAMDA Proceedings, published in the well established journal Frontiers in Genetics.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
In past years CAMDA has managed to have a good gender balance among keynotes and invited speakers. Last year we were hosting Ms Dr Catherine Lozupone as a distiguished keynote speaker and Ms Dr Kinga Zielińska as an invited speaker. CAMDA also puts a lot of efforts to especially promote young researchers at the beginning of their scientific career. CAMDA featured speakers from: Austria, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Palestine, Poland, Qatar, Spain, U.S.A.

Leadership Structure
The CompMS COSI is led by a mix of academic and industry researchers. The current CompMS COSI leadership consists of Wout Bittremieux (University of Antwerp, Belgium), Timo Sachsenberg (University of Tübingen, Germany), Isabell Bludau (Heidelberg University Hospital, Germany), Marie Brunet (University of Sherbrooke, CA), and Lindsay Pino (Talus Bio, WA, USA).

Activities Over the Last Year
The CompMS COSI significantly contributed to the ISMB 2024 conference held in Montreal, Canada. Through a dedicated track, we showcased cutting-edge developments in computational mass spectrometry. The program featured keynote presentations by Prof. Dr. Jennifer Geddes-McAlister, who discussed proteomics approaches to combat drug-resistant fungal diseases, and Prof. Dr. Jianguo Xia, who presented on MetaboAnalystR and related tools for metabolomics and multi-omics analyses. The track included 13 oral presentations selected from proceedings and abstract submissions, 2 sponsored oral presentations, and 21 poster presentations, creating a platform for early-career researchers and experienced professionals alike to share innovations and engage in scientific discussion. We are grateful for the support of AstraZeneca and MSAID, which provided travel fellowships that increased accessibility for early-career participants.

Beyond ISMB, CompMS members actively contributed to international forums, including the Bioinformatics Hub at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) and Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) conferences. CompMS also contributed to training activities through hands-on workshops, such as a short course on machine learning for mass spectrometry researchers and training sessions for the Skyline software.

The CompMS Slack workspace continues to grow as a central hub for the community, now bringing together over 370 members. It serves as a platform for knowledge sharing, professional networking, and career development. Members engage in discussions on the latest advancements, share solutions to computational challenges, and connect during international events. The workspace has also become a resource for career opportunities, mentorship, and collaboration.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
CompMS is strongly committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, actively striving for balanced gender and geographical representation across all activities. This commitment was demonstrated at the ISMB conference, where our keynote lineup featured an equal mix of female and male speakers. We pledge to continue our efforts to achieve a representative gender balance among future keynote speakers and panelists.

Supporting early-career researchers is a key priority within our diversity and inclusion efforts. Thanks to generous sponsoring by AstraZeneca and MSAID, we were able to provide travel fellowships for early-career researchers to attend ISMB 2024, ensuring greater accessibility and representation.

Additionally, CompMS has supported a Diversity Grant in computational mass spectrometry, funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, to advance inclusivity and promote underrepresented voices in the field. In collaboration with the Females in Mass Spectrometry (FeMS) community, we have introduced the Rising Star in Computational Mass Spectrometry Research Award to promote the visibility of emerging researchers.

Leadership Structure
Ferhat Ay - co-chair
Jishnu Das - co-chair
Yuri Pritykin - Organizing Committee Member
Hatice Ulku Osmanbeyoglu - Organizing Committee Member
Aly Azeem Khan - Organizing Committee Member

Activities Over the Last Year
The immune system protects organisms from pathogens as well as from threats within. Immune system is essential for homeostasis and health, and dysfunctions in the immune system are important contributing factors, if not the driving factors, for a wide range of human diseases. Our immune system is characterized by functional heterogeneity at the molecular and cellular level and operates across time scales. Both innate and adaptive branches of immunity consist of a continuum of cellular phenotypes driven by a complex network of intracellular regulators and extracellular signaling molecules. Immune cells interact with each other and with other cell types across tissues and organs. Adaptive immunity is further characterized by diversity of receptor repertoires enabling heterogeneity of specificities.
Advances in next generation sequencing techniques, proteomics, metabolomics and imaging are providing us opportunities to closely monitor human immune cells in health and disease, and uncover genomic and epigenomic signatures that can be linked to pathologies. However, the analyses and integration of such multi-faceted data are not trivial and present major computational challenges. Many of these challenges are unique to the immune system or to immune cells (e.g., TCR/BCR repertoire, epitope discovery, hematopoiesis, MHC binding prediction) and, hence, are not covered by other established COSI such as RegSys, SysMod, HitSeq and MLCSB.
This COSI will be the home for discussing computational methods that address such challenges typical in analysis of multi-dimensional data in immunology, as well as data-driven studies leading to exciting new fundamental and translational discoveries.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
We value diversity of backgrounds, expertise and opinion in our organizing committee, steering committee as well as our keynote speakers and invited speakers for the COSI track. Our proposed keynote speaker list will feature female scientists and scientists from outside North America every year. We will also ensure at least one relatively junior faculty who is doing high impact work in the recent years will be invited as a keynote. When selecting invited talks, we will consider balance in topics covered and in representation of different career stages. In particular, we will actively seek out speakers from underrepresented groups in the field, including women, racial and ethnic minorities, and individuals from diverse geographic regions. We will also make a concerted effort to include voices from non-traditional academic or research settings, such as industry, to reflect the full spectrum of the Systems Immunology field. The ultimate goal of the meeting is to provide a platform for information exchange and stimulate collaborations in the broad field of Systems Immunology among a diverse set of attendees that is representative of the general ISMB audience

Leadership Structure

Activities Over the Last Year

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts

Leadership Structure
The COSI is managed by three co-chairs: Patricia Palagi, Russell Schwartz, and Wai Keat Yam.

Activities Over the Last Year
The most prominent activity of the COSI each year is running the Education Track of ISMB. For ISMB 2024, this was an exciting program of invited and contributed talks as well as a panel discussion and an education component of the poster program. Last year's program included keynote talks by Rolanda Julius (South Africa) on data science training and health innovations in Africa and by Francis Ouellette celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bioinformatics.ca, a special session on feedback from the Bioinformatics Education Summit (see below), two proceedings talks, and a variety of contributed talks and posters.

The COSI also overlaps with the leadership of the Workshop in Education in Bioinformatics (WEB), a more interactive form of education session run typically just before or after the Education COSI track each year. Building on the Bioinformatics Education Summit 2024 ‘AI in Training’ session, WEB’24 explored implementing AI tools across the training spectrum, from generating and adapting instructional content to enhancing learning and teaching AI tool usage. Breakout groups focused on specific aspects like content generation, supporting IDEA principles, and improving learning outcomes.

The COSI has been a regular participant in the Bioinformatics Education Summit, an annual event that has become the leading gathering for the international bioinformatics education community. The Summit, conducted in a hybrid format, features working sessions where groups develop materials and strategies to support bioinformatics education and training. COSI members have participated in and organized several sessions on topics such as developing core competencies and evaluating degree programs and short courses. COSI members have also been working to support ongoing working groups that meet annually at the summit and to provide guidance to the organizers of the next summit meeting.

The COSI also works to encourage education-related events in other ISCB-affiliated conferences. This typically takes the form of talks, special sessions or panel discussions COSI members will offer as part of the program of other meetings. One such session in the past year consisted of a ISCB competency framework workshop at the Asia and Pacific Bioinformatics Joint Conference (APBJC2024) and two talks from the COSI leader at the International Colloquium on Bioinformatics Learning, Education, and Training (iCOBLET). COSI leaders also organized an education session for the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference (GLBIO), an ISCB-run conference of its Great Lakes regional affiliate group.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
EDI efforts are always a priority of the COSI in organizing its major activities, notably in ensuring outreach to diverse groups for recruiting keynote speakers each year. This is reflected in a slate of speakers that has reflected the diversity of the organization by a variety of measures, for example in an exceptionally good gender balance and geographic diversity compared to other society events. It is also reflected in the selection of topics and speakers for COSI sessions, for example in emphasis on training in low and middle income countries.

Leadership Structure
• Lars Arvestad, COSI co-chair (Stockholm University)
https://www.su.se/english/profiles/arve-1.232358
• Dannie Durand, COSI co-chair (Carnegie Mellon University)
https://www.cmu.edu/bio/people/faculty/durand.html
• Nadia El-Mabrouk, Abstract co-chair (Université de Montréal)
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~mabrouk/
• Edward Braun, Abstract co-chair (University of Florida), https://people.clas.ufl.edu/ebraun/
• Katharine Jahn, Abstract co-chair (University of Berlin)
https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/en/inf/groups/ag-bds/staff/jahn.html
• Erin Molloy, Area co-chair (University of Maryland), https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/people/emolloy
• Giltae Song, Award co-chair (Pusan National University) https://dmb.pusan.ac.kr/dmb/26323/subview.do

• Janani Ravi, Communication/website/Slack (Michigan State University), https://cvm.msu.edu/directory/ravi
• Aida Ouangraoua, Communication/website/Slack (University of Sherbrooke) https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/chairholders-titulaires/profile-eng.aspx
• Alexey Markin, Webinar (postdoc at USDA)
https://markin-alex.github.io/publications.html
• Louxin Zhang, (National University of Singapore)
https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/822-louxin-zhang
• Celine Scornavacca, (University of Montpellier)
https://sites.google.com/view/celinescornavacca

Activities Over the Last Year
This year, the EvolCompGen COSI at the ISMB congress was split across Days 4 and 5. We hosted a total of 30 talks, including 4 proceedings, ~40 posters, and 1 panel discussion to conclude our session. Researchers from around the world introduced several innovative methods and applications across evolutionary biology and comparative genomics. These included algorithms for solving problems in ncRNA families with novel distance metrics and dynamics of miRNAs, a progressive supertree algorithm for inferring transcript phylogenies, and a new representation for phylogenetic trees improving efficiency and comparison metrics. Other contributions encompassed automated pipelines for species tree inference from raw genome assemblies, alternative tests for molecular adaptation across genomes, and protein structure-based classifications enhancing orthology inference. Novel tools were also developed for inferring mitochondrial clones, cell lineage trees and modeling heteroplasmy, detecting genetic overlap in cancer progression, and reconstructing evolutionary histories using synteny and species trees. Our final session hosted a panel discussion to highlight the ongoing debates, open questions in the field, and cutting-edge methods that could seamlessly cross-pollinate across fields. Overall, our sessions were very well-attended (in person and via Juno), with ample time after each presentation to discuss a few enlightening questions. We also enjoyed an evening out with a pleasant dinner with 40+ COSI members at "Les 3 Brasseurs" on a lively street in Old Montreal.

For the significance and novelty of their work, as well as visual appeal and flow of their presentation, awards have been attributed to Abigail Bunkum (UCL, UK) and Evan Brenner (University of Colorado, US), with honorable mentions to Mathieu Gascon (University of Montréal, Canada) and Felix Langschied (Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany) for best long non-proceeding talk given by a student, and to Camila Castillo-Vilcahuaman (Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Peru) with honorable mention to Henry Secaira-Morocho (University of Tuebingen, Germany) for best posters.

Throughout the year, the EvolCompGen outreach and research community collaboration continues mainly through webinars, but also communications through Twitter/X:@EvolComp, Website:evolcompgen.org, and Slack: bit.ly/join_evolcompgen.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
The diversity of our COSI is reflected in the leadership structure, whose members are early career and established professors from all over the word, (Europe, North America and Asia) with an almost equal distribution of men and women. Moreover, each year, we make sure to use available COSI funds to help support the travel costs of students who are located at significant distances from the conference venue, and living in low-income and developing countries, in particular students from Asia and Africa.

Leadership Structure
COSI co-chairs alphabetically: Iddo Friedberg, Jason McDermott, Dukka KC, Ana Rojas, Mark Wass

Activities Over the Last Year
The CAFA competition, and integral part of the Function COSI, has received a grant of $1,800,000 USD from the NIH for continuing its activities. Some of these moneys are slated for conference travel to the Function COSI. We will continue the CAFA competition (CAFA 6) starting 9/2025 and will report on it in the Function COSI in 2026. The last CAFA competition (CAFA 5) engaged 1,897 participants. This show the large extent of the outreach and the work run by the Function COSI.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
We consider diversity when selecting presentations for the COSI looking for those form underrepresented groups and geographical regions, especially with respect to trainees. The COSI leadership structure includes two minorities and one woman. Keynote speakers over the years were female majority.

Leadership Structure
Ana Conesa, PhD
Spanish National Research Council, I2SysBio, Paterna, Spain and University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.

Francisco M. De la Vega, D.Sc.
Stanford University and Tempus AI, USA

Kjong Lehman, PhD
Centre of Medical Technology, Aachen, Germany

Christina Boucher, PhD
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.

Kristoffer Sahlin, PhD
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Brona Brejová, PhD
Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia

Can Alkan, PhD
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Dirk Evers, PhD
Dr. Dirk Evers Consulting, Enger, Germany

STUDENT -PhD Student- Ana Isabel Castillo Orozco MSc
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Activities Over the Last Year
* In preparations for the HiTSeq Track (ISMB, 2024, Montreal, Canada), we acquired three keynote speakers, Sushmita Roy, Evan Eichler, and Kin Fai Au.

* Sponsorship: HiTSeq acquired $5000 in sponsorship from Pacific Biosciences, contributing to four student travel fellowships of $1000 each, and prize money for the best talk and poster presentation.

* BioinfoBridges Podcast: We have collaborated with the ISCB Student Council to develop episodes for the Science Communication Initiative Podcast “Bioinfobridges.” The first episode was launched in March 2024, featuring Dr. Ana Conesa to discuss her professional trajectory to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science and her experience with long-read sequencing data and gene regulation. It is scheduled to release other episodes involving other members from the COSI HitSeq group in the upcoming months.
Episode Link:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/469vMKJZJsShIzVUDgz4HR?si=b00dc4add21b4d1e


* HitSeq Track (ISMB, 2024, Montreal, Canada):

HiTSeq track statistics
Number of total submissions: 75 abstract submissions.
Number of proceedings programmed: 7
Number of keynote speakers: 3
Number of total talks within track: 23
Total number of posters: 47 (42 in person and 5 virtual)
Sponsorship secured: 1
Travel fellowships issued: 4 ($1000 each)

We designed a program that spanned several key areas in high throughput sequence analysis, including statistical and machine learning methods for analyzing large sequencing datasets, methods for pangenome analysis, structural variation detection, genome assembly, long-read transcriptomics analysis, data structures for representing large sequence datasets, and methods for cancer genomics.

On the first day of the conference, Sushmita Roy delivered a keynote on her work developing statistical computational methods to identify the networks driving cellular functions by integrating different types of genome-wide datasets that measure various aspects of the cellular state. Dr. Roy has contributed to state-of-the-art methods by focusing on several unsupervised learning problems in genomics, such as 3D genome organization and regulatory networks. Dr. Roy also discussed some open questions with the audience in the following Q&A about modeling interactions with time series and extending her work for multiple species.

Other presentations before lunch focused on predicting the splicing status of single-cell RNA-seq data and single-cell data clustering. The session also featured a talk by Elizabeth Tseng from our sponsor, Pacific Biosciences (PacBio). She discussed PacBio's latest advancements in sequencing throughput and the latest data analysis methods, with a particular focus on transcriptome sequencing.

After lunch, five presentations on genomics focusing on pangenome analysis were given. Vikram Shivakumar (shared best talk winner) presented the method "Sigmoni”, a novel method for classifying nanopore signals with a compressed pangenome index, overcoming signal noise through exact matching and approximate location information. Another presentation addressed the challenges of sequence-to-graph alignment, specifically focusing on multi-label anchor chaining and how it improves alignment accuracy by incorporating fragments from biologically related samples. Other talks included methods for compressed indexing for pangenome substring queries, copy number calling using sequence-to-graph alignment, and targeted genotyping of complex polymorphic genes using both short and long reads.

In the last session of day 1, two talks were presented on structural variant discovery and advancements in long-read sequencing. The first talk introduced VISTA, an integrated framework for structural variant discovery. The second talk was from our keynote speaker, Evan Eichler. Dr. Eichler discussed the complexities of the human genome and how long-read sequencing, particularly with HiFi PacBio and Ultra-Long ONT, provides better resolution and continuity in mapping maternal and paternal chromosomes. Dr. Eichler also emphasized, referring to his latest studies, how a pangenome approach offers more comprehensive insights into human genome complexity than traditional linear references. The talk attracted many questions on Dr. Eichler's vision for the future of genomic diversity and structural variation detection in population graphs.

The second day of the conference started with a keynote presentation by Dr. Kin Fai Au. Dr. Au's keynote focused on the advantages of using long-read sequencing to improve gene isoform quantification. He highlighted the limitations of short reads and introduced a Bayesian network-based model for long-read quantification. There were also two presentations on long-read genome assembly. One was about telomere-to-telomere haplotype assembly by guaranteeing SNV information be preserved in reads. The second talk introduced a method that identifies overlapping nanopore signals without base calling, enabling de novo assembly from raw signal data.

In the first session after lunch, we had five talks. The first two talks focused on advanced data structures and schemes for representing sequencing data, highlighting the time and space advances that could be made when going beyond basic representation. The first presentation, given by Igor Martayan, introduced the Conway-Bromage-Lyndon (CBL) structure as a dynamic and efficient method for representing k-mer sets. The second presentation, by Xin Yuan, introduced Locality-Sensitive Bucketing (LSB) Functions to improve large-scale sequence comparisons, focusing on highly diverse sequences. There were also presentations on fast multiple-sequence alignment, a forward-looking presentation on quantum computing for genomic analysis, and a talk on discovering transcriptome complexity by combining short and long-read sequencing data.


The last session of HiTSeq COSI contained four talks—the first two discussed tissue and cellular deconvolution methods. The third talk presented an analysis of genomic and epigenomic heterogeneity in prostate cancer from tissue and liquid biopsy. The last talk of the session was given by Rija Zaidi (shared best talk winner). Rija presented an algorithm, Phantom, designed to improve single-cell phylogenetic reconstruction by integrating sequencing read counts. Phantom enhances accuracy in inferring phylogenies, particularly in detecting single-nucleotide variations (SNVs), and performs better in time-sensitive scenarios compared to other methods.

In addition to the two best presentation prizes, HiTSeq also gave the best poster award to Nicolas Jacquin for the poster entitled "K-mer Walking: An Efficient Reference-Free Algorithm for Flanking Sequence Reconstruction".

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
To support DEI efforts, we aimed to promote a rough balance between male and female speakers at the annual HiTSeq meeting. We had one female and two male keynote speakers but invited additional female keynotes who declined. As for the remaining 20 talks (including the sponsored talk), 5 of the presentations were given by females. Some further work remains to achieve a better gender balance.

Leadership Structure
Leadership Structure
Organizing Committee
Athma Pai, UMass Medical School, USA
Michelle Scott, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada
Hagen Tilgner, Weill Cornell Medicine
Maayan Salton, Hebrew University, Israel

Abstract Committee
Athma Pai, UMass Medical School, USA
Michelle Scott, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada
Hagen Tilgner, Weill Cornell Medicine, USA
Maayan Salton, Hebrew University, Israel
Blake Sweeney, EMBL-EBI, UK

Proceedings Liaison
Jérôme Waldispühl, McGill University, Canada

Activities Over the Last Year
iRNA 2024 involved the participation of 201 delegates of the conference (178 in person and 23 virtual). On our first day, the iRNA COSI started off with a keynote by Julia Salzman from Stanford University who presented SPLASH, a new statistics-first analytic approach which represents a paradigm shift in the analysis of sequencing datasets. We then had many talks discussing sequencing biases, new methods and approaches enabling a better resolution of the transcriptome/epitranscriptome and their application to specific contexts resulting in an increased understanding of the transcriptome, its regulation and its output. Our lively lunchtime poster session was advertised by nice concise, dynamic and original flash talks. Our last talk of the day was a keynote by Ashley Laughney, from Cornell University, who described tools to map genotypes to complex cellular and in vivo functions at scale and approaches that investigate the startling findings that activation of a given protein or signaling pathway can lead to very diverse functional outputs depending on the context. Many iRNA participants then had dinner at Restaurant Les Soeurs Grises where in addition to sampling Québécois cuisine, they were also subjected to our traditional and entertaining iRNA quiz measuring their depth (or lack) of knowledge of Montreal. The second day of iRNA 2024 started with a keynote by Chris Burge from MIT who presented the KATMAP algorithm, an approach that uses in vitro binding data and knockdown/RNA-seq to derive splicing activity maps of RNA binding proteins to enable advanced interpretation of RNA splicing. We then had diverse talks, considering diverse organisms, discussing RNA foundational models and their uses, RNA design and the prediction of different RNA features and regulations including translation initiation, protein-RNA-binding, the extent and conservation of translational efficiency covariation, polyadenylation, G4 RNA presence and RNA structure. We finished the day with our fourth keynote talk by Jérôme Waldispühl from McGill University who presented a data-driven structural virtual screening pipeline which uses an augmented classification of RNA base pairs combined with graph machine learning methods to identify promising candidate molecule binding.

Year-round activities
-Management of the iRNA COSI website to inform and mobilize the community: https://irnacosi.org/
-iRNA talk in the ISCB Academy: Yezi Xiang (Duke University) discussed Pervasive downstream RNA hairpins dynamically dictate start-codon selection in January 2024

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
When choosing our COSI keynote speakers, in addition to well-known scientists in our field, we spend time searching for members of our community whose work we could highlight, who conduct excellent research but might not be senior sought-after speakers (yet), a good proportion of which are members of minorities. When selecting abstracts for our talks, we always consider simultaneously equity, diversity and inclusion and scientific excellence. Including all researchers that see themselves as computational RNA scientists regardless of their origin is a fundamental principle of our COSI and we are completely convinced that increasing diversity in members increases diversity in ideas, enriching our community.

Leadership Structure
Yesid Cuesta Astroz , Claudia Gonzaga Jauregui, and Melike Donertas serve as the JPI co-leads.

Activities Over the Last Year
The JPI COSI maintains a New PI Slack ISCB channel and participates in the ISCB webinar series. Typically, the JPI COSI strives to plan and moderate a track session and a Birds of a Feather session at ISMB annually. We have now recruited co-leads based in North America and Europe and recommend this moving forward to better facilitate sustained international community-building efforts.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
As part of ISCB, the JPI COSI values diverse and inclusive participation across the computational biology and bioinformatics community. To that end, our goal is to support community building that is broadly accessible by facilitating virtual and in-person networking, education, and scientific events.

Leadership Structure
Alice McHardy, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Germany
Alexander Sczyrba, University of Bielefeld, Germany

Activities Over the Last Year
The MICROBIOME COSI 2024 featured two keynote talks given by (1) Susannah G. Tringe from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, United States, on "Sequence-based interrogation of soil microbiomes and their ecosystem benefits", and (2) Christopher Quince from Earlham Institute, United Kingdom, on "Towards fully genome-resolved metagenomics". On January 24, 2024, we hosted the ISCB academy webinar "Deconstructing and Reconstructing Microbiomes and their role in AMR Transmission", by Niranjan Nagarajan from the Genome Institute of Singapore and Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
The COSI invited an equal number of male and female keynote speakers, and has a gender- balanced COSI leadership team.

Leadership Structure
Anshul Kundaje and Oznur Tastan are MLCSB co-presidents and are supported by the MLCSB board.

Activities Over the Last Year
This year's MLCSB track included a panel session on Trustworthy AI in the life sciences, chaired by Peter Koo who was joined by Su-In Lee, Joshua Welch and Yvan Saeys. As well as running the MLCSB COSI, we also support the MLCB meeting which is now a standalone meeting, typically US-based, with several MLCB organisers on our board. We run a COSI twitter account, managed by Sayane Shome, to advertise relevant events and activities.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
MLCSB encourages diversity and representation within its leadership. The MLCSB meeting has had at least one female co-chair (of two) since 2019 and has female and male co-presidents. Chairs are invited to become board members after ISMB and this ensures the board also has good gender representation. We also pursue increasing diversity in terms of ethnicity and geography in our leadership by ensuring that our track chair selection lists are diverse, which then feeds into our board. We also allocate travel fellowships diversely.

Leadership Structure
Committee Representative: Martina Summer-Kutmon
Alt. Committee Representative: Mehmet Koyuturk
Track Chair: Anaïs Baudot
Track Chair: Chad Myers
Proceedings Liaison: Martina Summer-Kutmon
Abstract Chair: Scooter Morris
Abstract Chair: Deisy Morselli Gysi

ISCBacademy program coordinator: Alexandros Xenos
Liaison ISBC Student Council: Pradeep Eranti
Outreach/conferences: Noel Malod Dognin

Activities Over the Last Year
The core activity in 2024 was coordinating the new leadership team and organizing the 1 ½-days NetBio COSI session at ISMB 2024 in Montreal, Canada. Highlights included keynotes by Prof. Sergio Baranzini, Prof. Anne-Claude Gingras, and Prof. Patrick Aloy, along with four proceedings presentations and ten contributed talks, all in a session that was very well attended, showcasing the interest and enthusiasm for the network biology field. With 49 submissions, we also hosted two vibrant poster sessions showcasing 36 NetBio posters. Congratulations to our prize winners Merel Kuijs (best talk prize), Emily Bozich (best method poster), Bahareh Parcheh Bafi (best application poster), and Davide Buzzao (best resource poster).

We also hosted an inspiring ISCB academy webinar by Salvo D. Lombardo, our ISMB 2023 poster prize winner, on 21 May 2024, on “The chemical exposure network: a multi-scale study of the impact of chemicals in human health”.

We were also excited to host a NetBio session at the BelBi 2024 conference in Belgrade with a keynote and several invited speakers.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
Careful attention is paid to equity, diversity, and inclusion when selecting committee members and speakers for all organized events and activities. In 2024, half of the chair positions in our organizing committee were held by women. At our ISMB session, we aim for diversity among our keynote speakers and selected speakers (30% female) with presenters from North America (8), Europe (5), Asia (3), and South America (1).

Leadership Structure
The COSI has a steering committee with three co-chairs which are listed below.
Steering Committee:
Stein Aerts
Ferhat Ay
Jason Ernst (Co-Chair)
Manolis Kellis
Christina Leslie
Jian Ma
Shaun Mahony
Sushmita Roy (Co-Chair)
Saurabh Sinha (Co-Chair)
Lonnie Welch
Judith Zaugg
Julia Zeitlinger

Additional individuals participate in the organization of COSI run meetings.

Activities Over the Last Year
The activities of the group over the past year were:
1. ISMB Regulatory & Systems Genomics 2-day Track at ISMB
2. RECOMB/ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics with DREAM Challenges
3. The drafting of a perspective article invited to Bioinformatics Advances. A pre-print of which is available on bioRxiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04363)
4. Sponsoring an online slack discussion channel

Additional details on the first two items are provided below

1. ISMB Regulatory & Systems Genomics 2-day Track at ISMB

Day 1 Summary of RegSys at ISMB 2024
The RegSys 2024 session opened with a keynote by Carl de Boer (University of British Columbia), presenting his team's Prix Fixe approach for model optimization, an API for continuous benchmarking, and highlighting the risk of data leakage due to genome sequence similarities.

Talks in the morning session addressed methods to interpret deep learning models for regulatory mechanisms, including contributed talks by Peter Koo and Melanie Weilert, and culminated in five flash talks featuring innovative research from the RegSys poster session.

The second session featured a keynote by Jian Ma (Carnegie Mellon University) on the role of 3D genome structure in gene function, including methods to analyze single-cell Hi-C data and strategies to address low-coverage Hi-C using gene expression data.

Subsequent talks explored methods for analyzing bulk and single-cell Hi-C data, showcasing techniques for handling low coverage, identifying chromatin loops, and uncovering novel biological insights. Presentations included two proceedings papers by Bill Noble and Ghulam Murtaza.

The day concluded with a keynote by Michael Hoffman (Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) on “Virtual ChIP,” a method for predicting transcription factor binding using a combination of expression, conservation, chromatin, and motif data—a scalable alternative to exhaustive ChIP-seq profiling.

Final talks focused on genome annotation and data curation, with topics like detecting methylation sites across species and tissues, underscoring the importance of curated data in regulatory genomics.

Day 1 highlighted theoretical innovation, practical tools, and methodological advancements, reflecting the dynamic and evolving nature of regulatory genomics.

Day 2 Summary of RegSys at ISMB 2024

Day 2 began with a keynote by Maria Colomé Tatché (University of Groningen) on the use of single-cell ATAC-seq and single-cell DNA methylation data to study cell identity. She presented the epiAneufinder algorithm for detecting copy number variations from scATAC-seq data. Colomé Tatché also introduced a method to reconstruct cell-type methylation profiles using minION sequencing and single-molecule methylation signal deconvolution.

The morning session featured talks on advances in computational approaches for single-cell data integration and regulatory association discovery. Talks included a proceedings paper presentation by Yang Yang describing the REUNION framework for transcription factor binding prediction and regulatory association inference from single-cell multi-omics data.

The afternoon session began with a focus on spatial transcriptomics, beginning with a proceedings paper presentation by Hirak Sarkar on a method to delineate cell-cell interactions in spatial transcriptomics data. The topics then moved into gene regulatory network inference from single-cell data, including a proceedings paper presentation by Noa Moriel. Key topics included multi-omics data integration, batch effect mitigation, and neural ODEs for dynamic gene regulatory network inference.

To conclude Day 2, a keynote by Hae Kyung Im (University of Chicago) explored how deep learning models can predict gene expression from DNA sequences, enhancing transcriptome-wide association studies and enabling cross-ancestry and cross-species analysis.

Day 2 showcased advances in single-cell epigenomics, multi-omics data integration, and computational modeling, with a strong focus on novel methods for regulatory element discovery and analysis.


2. RECOMB/ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics with DREAM Challenges
The 2024 RECOMB/ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics (RSG)
was held on October 2–3 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, following the DREAM
Challenges meeting on October 1.

The RSG meeting was co-chaired by Dr. Ferhat Ay (La Jolla Institute for Immunology/UCSD), Dr. Aly A. Khan (University of Chicago), and Dr. Sushmita Roy (University of Wisconsin - Madison). The meeting focused on emerging issues in gene regulation and regulatory genomics. It featured four keynote speakers, numerous contributed talks selected from reviewed abstracts, and poster sessions that facilitated networking among attendees who came from all across US, Canada and international venues.

On Day 1, keynotes were delivered by Dr. Matthew Stephens on statistical methods in
genetics and Dr. Maria Chikina on machine learning approaches for representation and
analysis of epigenomic datasets. The day included sessions on epigenomics and single-
cell genomics and concluded with a networking event at Der Rathskeller. Day 2 featured
keynotes by Dr. Sunduz Keles on advances in statistical genomics for single cell
regulatory genomic datasets and Dr. Shaun Mahony on transcriptional regulation and
chromatin structure. Sessions covered topics such as genetic variation, disease,
network dynamics, and transcriptome research, with poster sessions and coffee breaks
enabling collaboration. Several attendees mentioned to conference organizers about
the quality of the scientific presentations and the collegial and collaborative environment
for researchers at all levels.

The two-day event successfully facilitated discussion, learning, and the forging of new
professional interactions. Conference sessions were moderated by the program chairs
and other faculty, while poster sessions during lunch allowed for formal and informal
interactions among presenters and attendees. Overall, RSG provided a platform for four
keynote talks, 26 contributed talks, and 35 posters, fostering exciting scientific
exchange on the scenic campus of the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

The DREAM session of the conference was co-chaired by Elise Blaese and Pablo Meyer of IBM research. It was composed of 1 full day of sessions presenting the results of 3 challenges, kicked off with Joel Mainland from Monell Chemical Senses who gave a keynote on Predicting Odor Perception from Molecular Structure. Followed by the presentation of the results of the DREAM olfactory mixture prediction challenge, building models to predict the discriminability of olfactory mixtures. Continuing with the DREAM portion, the amazing Keynote by Benjamin Haibe-Kains from University of Toronto described how an open science approach can help the cancer computational pharmacogenomics field. Results were then presented for Placental Clock DREAM challenge: Where participants built a new epigenetic clock based on the latest Illumina methylation arrays to achieve greater accuracy in predicting gestational age, a surrogate for the biological age of the placenta. Three participants in the challenge showed their results. This was followed by the presentations (3 talks) on the Personal Environment and Genes Study (PEGS) Challenge to model interactions between genetics and environment to guide disease risk prediction, biological discovery, and prevention strategies. Once again, the enthusiasm of the assistants and organizers shows how important it is for the DREAM community to get together once a year as the discussions lingered long after the
sessions were over. We were happy to see that the 16th annual DREAM-RSG conference in Madison Wi was a success! It attracted people from all over the world; with attendees all the way from Taiwan UK, Germany, Belgium, France and Switzerland as well as all over the US. It was fantastic to be able to come together again to discuss science.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
Equity, diversity, and inclusion are given careful consideration during the selection of chairs and speakers for all events and activities organized by RegSys COSI. For instance, we have achieved gender diversity in the composition of leadership, committees, and speakers.

Leadership Structure
A team of six coordinators and one volunteer, who virtually meet once per month, jointly organize the SysMod COSI.

(a) Executive chairperson:
Bhanwar Lal Puniya, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, US

(b) COSI Coordinators (alphabetical order):
Shaimaa Bakr, Stanford University, US,
Matteo Barberis, University of Surrey, UK,
Chiara Damiani, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, IT,
Reihaneh Mostolizadeh, Justus Liebig University Giessen, DE
Bhanwar Lal Puniya, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, US
Meghna Verma, AstraZeneca, US

(c) COSI volunteer:
Nantia Leonidou, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, DE

(d) Primary COSI representative:
Bhanwar Lal Puniya, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, US

(e) Alternate COSI representative:
Andreas Dräger, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, DE

(f) COSI Programming Coordinators for ISCBacademy (alphabetical order):
Shaimaa Bakr, Stanford University, US
Nantia Leonidou, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, DE
Meghna Verma, AstraZeneca, US

Activities Over the Last Year
The primary activity of SysMod is the annual one-day meeting at the ISMB/ECCB conference. It provides a platform for the latest developments in mechanistic and predictive modeling of biological systems and applications across disciplines. SysMod community hosts webinars and is also engaged in communication with community members via Google group, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn pages.

ISMB-2024: Dr. Meghna Verma and Dr. Matteo Bbarberis hosted the SysMod event in 2024. The event featured two keynote talks, 9 contributed talks, and 25 posters on topics including modeling of metabolic processes, immune processing, regulatory processes in epithelial to mesenchymal transition, agent based modeling tools, and modeling of viral infection with pathogens. Melissa Kemp (Georgia Institute of Technology & Emory University, Atlanta, USA) and Nathan Price (Thorne HealthTech, New York, USA) delivered the keynote talks on the following topics: SysMod awarded three poster prizes to Nirvana Nursimulu (1st prize), Ave Bisesi (2nd prize), and Dan Peng (3rd prize).

Webinars: In 2024, SysMod organized one ISCBAcademy webinar on Feb 20, 2024 by Simon Mitchell focused on multi-scale modeling to study patient heterogeneity. The webinar was well attended by over 20 attendees from across the globe. The recording for this webinar has been posted on the ISCB youtube channel.

Publication from COSI: SysMod COSI published a perspectives article on computational modeling of biological systems and the role of the SysMod community advancing the field in Bioinformatics Advances.

- Citation: Bhanwar Lal Puniya, Meghna Verma, Chiara Damiani, Shaimaa Bakr, Andreas Dräger, Perspectives on computational modeling of biological systems and the significance of the SysMod community, Bioinformatics Advances, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2024, vbae090, https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbae090

Outreach and other activities: Over the past year, SysMod has maintained a community discussion list (e.g., the announcement of impactful new research, meetings, job opportunities, etc.) and a community calendar (e.g., conferences, workshops, and schools). It has an active Google group with 300 active members. Additionally, SysMod maintains a LinkedIn page with about 100 followers and an X account with about 600 followers.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
Over the years, the SysMod coordinators have always promoted equal opportunities for researchers irrespective of their gender, beliefs, ethnicity, and other non-scientific aspects, as the highly diverse composition of the coordinators’ group, the scientific advisory board, and alumni indicate. From its inception, scientific quality has always been the first criterion for inviting keynote speakers. SysMod has always strived to achieve the highest scientific quality while inviting speakers from diverse countries with various backgrounds and ethnicities and with a gender balance to present a wide variety of excellent researchers within the community. SysMod will continue to support underrepresented researchers when inviting keynote speakers. The submitted contributions, genders, and ethnicities will be balanced, depending on the potential presenting invited authors. Contributed talks and posters, on the other hand, are solely chosen based on scientific quality and soundness.

Leadership Structure
Representative: Robert Leaman
Track Chairs: Robert Leaman, Lars Juhl Jensen, Zhiyong Lu

Activities Over the Last Year
The ISMB 2024 text mining track was a one-day event featuring two keynote speakers, an expert panel, and an extensive range of scientific presentations and posters.
- The COSI track highlighted advances in integrating biomedical literature, molecular data, and computational tools to enhance knowledge extraction and reasoning in biomedical research. Key themes included automated extraction of disease-related molecular variations, improving biomedical reasoning with retrieval-augmented models, and bioinformatics code generation. Several talks explored applications of language models and AI-driven approaches for drug discovery, clinical research, and gene set analysis, demonstrating the growing role of AI in bridging text mining with experimental and clinical data.
- COSI track keynote speaker Richard Scheuermann highlighted efforts at the U.S. National Library of Medicine to build a comprehensive cell type knowledge graph by integrating single-cell transcriptomics with text-mined insights. The project aims to combine computational and text mining pipelines to identify known and novel cell types, extract biologically relevant relationships, and create a knowledge resource to advance biomedical discovery.
- Keynote speaker Peipei Ping emphasized the importance of user-centric workflows in text mining to bridge the gap between biomedical text data and clinical decision-making, particularly in cardiovascular research. By leveraging clinical case reports, knowledge graphs, and retrieval-augmented methods, the talk illustrated how text mining can enhance disease understanding and translational research impact.
- The COSI track concluded with a panel by Karin Verspoor, Cathy Wu, and Yanli Wang on AI, text mining, and large language models (LLMs) in biomedical research, examining both their potential and limitations. Discussions covered LLMs' probabilistic nature—excelling in fluency but struggling with logical consistency and inheriting biases—along with the need for well-curated, AI-ready resources, successful applications, and NIH strategies for data infrastructure, open science, and workforce development.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
We support diversity in science and seek to create an inclusive community. We consider gender balance and underrepresented backgrounds when inviting keynote and invited speakers, and our scientific program reflects our commitment to promoting researchers from diverse backgrounds.

Leadership Structure
Venkata Satagopam is currently the TransMed COSI Representative and a COSI Track Chair. Maria Secrier is currently the alternate COSI Committee Representative, and a COSI Track Chair. Irene Ong is the COSI Proceedings Liaison and a COSI Track Chair.
Irina Balaur is COSI abstracts chair and a COSI Track Chair, and Heba Sailem, Mansoor Saqi, Bosdriesz Evert serve as COSI Track Chairs. Irina Balaur also serves as the ISCBacademy TransMed Program Coordinator.

Activities Over the Last Year
TransMed 2023 meeting was held during the ISMB/ECCB 2023 conference on July 10 - 14, 2023 in Lyon, France. TransMed 2023 had 2 keynote speakers invited:
Dr Maggie Cheang / Institute of Cancer Research who is the Group Leader of the Integrative Genomics Analysis in clinical trials, Division of Clinical Studies. Her primary research focus is to identify biomarkers that would be clinically relevant. Combining biological knowledge and advanced statistical analytics/machine learning to model the multi-scale multi- “omics data” with clinical outcome, her team has been developing multi-parametric molecular classifiers to predict sensitivity and resistance of tumour biological subtype to therapeutic agents and testing the performance of one of these integrated omics/mathematical algorithms within a Phase III clinical trial at this moment..
Prof Alfonso Valencia, who is ICREA research Professor, Director of the Life Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute INB/ELIXIR-ES and coordinator of the data pillar of the Spanish Personalised Medicine intiative, IMPaCT. His research interest is the development of Computational Biology methods and their application to biomedical problems. Some of the computational methods he developed are considered pioneering work in areas such as biological text mining, protein coevolution, disease networks and more recently modelling cellular systems (digital twins).

In total, TransMed 2023 had 1 proceedings, 5 long talks (20 min slot) ,12 short talks (10 min slot) selected from the abstracts and 101 posters.

We had a very exciting day of talks spanning very diverse areas of biology and biomedicine. The day started with. Dr Maggie Cheang’s keynote, who gave a very insightful account of how biomarkers are utilised in the clinic, and the constraints existing around developing and testing biomarkers alongside clinical trials. This was followed by a series of excellent talks covering newly developed statistical, AI and graph reasoning methods as well as applications of existing computational methods to very diverse biomedical datasets, from genomics, transcriptomics, methylation, spatial biology, histopathology, radiology and other clinical markers, to drug data, electronic health records and semantically integrated knowledgebases. We have learned about new methodology to deal with privacy concerns when using genetic data, infer ancestry, understand the effects of genetic alterations or risk factors such as smoking in disease, and also about innovative approaches that we can apply to sparse datasets like those encountered in rare diseases. We also learnt about new ways to identify biomarkers of disease and predict drug effects with implications for understanding clinical failure in drug administration and even in organ transplants. Finally, Prof Alfonso Valencia rounded up the TransMed COSI in the final keynote of the day with a brilliant talk describing how to leverage patient and real world datasets to overcome small sample sizes when studying rare diseases and to maximise the use of recorded data to understand transmission of infectious diseases like Covid. As highlighted by all of today’s speakers, we face increasing analytical and computing challenges when integrating increasingly complex datasets and translating them in the clinic, and there is a clear opportunity for computational, statistical and AI methods to transform the field of translational medicine in the coming years.

We also selected the Best talk and the Best Poster awards considering both the scores of the abstract reviews and presentations during the TransMed 2023 meeting as follows.

Best Talk
Michelle Li, (Harvard Medical School, USA), “Deep learning for diagnosing patients with rare genetic diseases”

Best Poster
Dries Heylen, (UHasselt &VITO NV, Belgium), “Evaluating the frequency of multi-omics longitudinal data collection in the perspective of chronic disease development”


We welcomed new members of the TransMed COSI organizers (core team) for the year 2023-2024:
Evert Bosdriez, PhD. (VU Amsterdam, Netherlands)
We thank very much for her contribution during the 2021 - 2023 time period and said goodbye to
Sanne Abeln, Prof. (VU Amsterdam & Utrecht University, Netherlands)

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
We gave importance to gender balance and had a female and a male keynote speakers forTransMed 2023 COSI. In our COSI organising committee, we have 60% females.

Leadership Structure
Our COSI is led by 5 co-chairs: Julien Gagneur, Emidio Capriotti, Hannah Carter and Antonio Rausell, Tayo Obafemi-Ayaji

Activities Over the Last Year
This year, VariCOSI's primary activity was through the annual ISMB conference.

At ISMB 2024, VarI COSI held its 14th session, bringing the latest developments and discoveries on variant interpretation. The session received 34 abstract submissions, with 25 submitted for talks and posters and 9 for posters only. The final schedule included 10 selected talks as well as 1 proceedings presentation and 3 keynote speakers.

The morning’s keynote featured Dr. Jun Cheng who opened with the presentation of the AlphaMissense model, leveraging AlphaFold's structure prediction and population variant data for the prediction of missense pathogenic variants. The different training strategies, including fine-tuning steps, that led to higher precision were presented, and several limitations and aspects for improvement were discussed. The morning session was completed with 3 talks on the development and applications of protein large-language models to the prediction of missense variant functional effects. Second keynote featured Dr. Heidi L. Rehm work on the ClinGen project, a comprehensive resource establishing reference annotations and guidelines for the clinical assessment of genes and variants and their relevance on clinical diagnosis. The presentation covered different ClinGen projects, infrastructure, classification systems, collaborative efforts, and future developments in genetic variant interpretation and data sharing.

Talks and proceeding presentations in the afternoon covered other major areas in the field of variant interpretation, including computational ensemble predictions to decrease VUS rates, RNA-seq data analysis for identifying disease-causing splicing variants, transcriptional profiling for functional assessment of cancer driver mutations, metacell burden analysis to explore neurodevelopmental disorder impacts, quantitative mutation scoring for predicting cancer drug response, evolutionary-informed models for understanding genotype-phenotype relationships in Drosophila melanogaster, and phylogenetic mutation-selection models to predict fitness effects of mutations in extant mammals. The session was closed with a third keynote featured by Dr. Pedro Tomaz da Silva on DNA language models and the architecture of nucleotide dependencies in genomes.

This year's session saw 134 delegate registrations, including 29 virtual attendees, and active participation with questions and discussions both on site and virtual.

Equity, Diversification, and Inclusion Efforts
We strive to be inclusive of all members of our scientific community and ensure representation at our annual meeting. We consider EDI when identifying potential keynote speakers. The VarI COSI strongly promotes gender balance. Currently Hannah Carter is our representative to the committee.