ISMB/ECCB 2025: Liverpool, LLMs and Lessons in Open Science

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Muhamad Haries Ramdhani, a PhD Student at the University of Aberdeen, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the ISMB/ECCB 2025.

The Journey to Liverpool

I had heard about ISMB before, but I wasn’t entirely clear on its joint conference format with ECCB. What I did know was that ISMB/ECCB is arguably the biggest conference for computational biology in the world. For months, my attendance felt uncertain, as I initially didn’t know if the 2025 edition would be held in the UK. When the location was confirmed as Liverpool, it was a huge relief. Being a UK-based student meant I was fortunate enough to avoid a lengthy and often stressful visa application process.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Tayyaba Alvi, a PhD student at Fritz Lipmann Institute on Aging, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the ISMB2025.

ISMB 2025: A Week of Learning, Teaching, and Connecting in Liverpool

Thanks to the Event Fellowship from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), I had the chance to attend the 33rd Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2025) in Liverpool. It’s the annual meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and the biggest conference in the field. This year, it brought together over 2,000 researchers from all over the world at ACC Liverpool, a beautiful venue right by the Albert Dock.

The call for applications for round 2 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2025 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 August 2025. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)’s Event Fellowship program is aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open science in the bioinformatics and biological research communities. Awards are made three times a year; the next deadline is August 1, 2025.

Thanks to the Event Fellowship from Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), I was privileged to attend the 2025 International Statistical Genetics Workshop (ISG). ISG is an intensive, week-long workshop held annually in Boulder, Colorado that provides hands-on training in the principles and application of over a dozen open-access bioinformatics tools for analysis of genomic data. This workshop has been running since 1987 and boasts a faculty of world-renowned experts in statistical genetics from around the globe. The curriculum switches annually between family-based and population-based genetic studies. The focus this year was on the theory, performance, and interpretation of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and their downstream analyses.

The websites and blog posts of the OBF go back a long way, with the first posts having been published all the way back in June 2001. Keeping them accessible and findable under stable links is not an easy feat, especially given that since 2001 we’ve changed the way we create and serve those pages more than once, most recently in March of this year. And while we have successfully managed to do so, we thought it would be nice to have some backup plans in place.

We recognize that the high price of travel and registration can make it hard for some people to attend BOSC/ISMB. Below are some ways to apply for financial assistance to present your work at BOSC 2025.

We are pleased to announce that BOSC and the newly-renamed Bio-Ontologies and Knowledge Representation (BOKR) will join forces for a day at ISMB/ECCB 2025! The joint session will include talks chosen from abstracts submitted to BOSC or BOKR, plus a keynote speaker who is well known in both the ontology and open science communities (stay tuned for an announcement soon!).

CollaborationFest 2025 will be a two-day collaborative work event at which participants work together to contribute code, documentation, training materials, and challenging analysis problems and use cases. Bring your own project ideas or come ready to collaborate with others on their projects!

BOSC has held CollaborationFests (aka CoFests) every year before or after ISMB since 2010. This year, we decided to hold the CollaborationFest as part of ISMB/ECCB and open it to all registered ISMB/ECCB participants. It will take place during the last two days of ISMB/ECCB.

Over the past few weeks, we have been working behind the scenes to migrate our website, resulting in the page that you currently have in front of you! Our pages are now generated by the Go-based, open source static site generator Hugo, and are stored on GitHub. All old URLs should continue working as before, but if you run into any missing pages or other issues, please let us know by submitting an issue or contacting us via the channels linked in the page footer.

The call for applications for round 1 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2025 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2025. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)’s Event Fellowship program is aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open science in the bioinformatics and biological research communities. Awards are made three times a year; the next deadline is April 1, 2025. (For those who want to apply for BOSC, note that this is earlier than the BOSC/ISMB submission deadline of April 17.)