The OBF Event Award program has successfully completed its first 10 years. Initially called the Travel Fellowship program, the Event Award was launched in March 2016 with the goal of increasing diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics or open science by providing financial support to selected applicants to help them attend these events. The program was conceived as a way to “put our money where our mouths were”, as a concrete way to help increase diversity and representation in the open source / open science bioinformatics community. In April 2016, the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code donated USD$18,125 to fund the program.

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. Sneha Murmu, a Scientist at ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute (ICAR-IASRI), was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the 25th International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB/ISCB-APAC 2026).

Bioinformatics is changing rapidly as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly intertwined with biological data analysis. I had an opportunity to experience this transition closely while attending the 25th International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB 2026) and the 1st ISCB Asia-Pacific Conference (ISCB-APAC 2026) in Penang, Malaysia, from 14-17 September 2026. My participation was supported by an Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship. Coming from an agricultural bioinformatics background, I approached the meeting with a particular question in mind: how can some of these emerging computational approaches be translated to agricultural research?

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. Moaaz Khokhar, a PhD Candidate at Koç University, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2026).

I attended the 25th European Conference on Computational Biology in Geneva, held from 31 August to 4 September 2026. I work on predicting allosteric sites in proteins: regions where binding can influence activity elsewhere in the molecule. This makes the relationship between sequence, structure and function a practical problem in my research.

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. Disha Tandon, an ARISE2 fellow at EMBL-EBI, UK, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the NFDI4LS-Integrative Bioinformatics conference.

CC-BY-SA Mary-Ann Ebeling

Recently I attended the Nationale Forschungsdaten Infrastuktur for Life Sciences (NFDI4LS) - Integrative Bioinformatics conference organised at the Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (IPK) in Gatersleben, Germany. Thanks to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation’s Event Award, I got to take my work beyond my desk and share it with a diverse community active in research data management.

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. Jeremy Fan, an independent researcher, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2026.

The opening session at ISMB 2026

I want to thank the BOSC committee and all the organizers at the conference. At BOSC 2026, I presented BioFmt, attended talks on AI-assisted work, and spoke with researchers building small, specialized tools. Those conversations were a chance to connect my own experience with what others were working on. A recurring theme for me was how we check the software and scientific outputs that are becoming easier to produce.

We will be holding an online OBF Public Board meeting on Tuesday 15 September 2026, at 15:00 UTC (8am PDT, 11am EDT, 4pm BST, 5pm CEST), on the Zoom platform.

Under the OBF bylaws we must give at least 10 days notice of a public board meeting. This message should also have reached the OBF membership by email - the members mailing list is the membership roll.

Agenda:

• Approve December 2023 Public Board Meeting minutes.
• Formally thank out-going board members at large, Iddo Friedberg and Hilyatuz Zahroh.
• Elections to the OBF Board:
  • The current board members have reached or are approaching the end of their expected three year terms, and are standing for re-election: Peter Cock (President), Nomi Harris (Vice President), Heather Wiencko (Treasurer), Hilmar Lapp, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Chris Fields, and Caleb Kibet (board members at large).
  • This will be an electronic ballot of the current board members.
  • Additional nominations to the board will be considered (ideally the week before hand). We have approached a few candidates directly.

Nominations are welcome for the OBF Board election

OBF is committed to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. The roles and functions of OBF have evolved over the last 20 years, and currently include:

The 27th Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2026, took place July 14-15 as part of Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2026, in Washington, DC, USA (with a virtual participation option). About 2100 people attended ISMB 2026 (1800 in person), with 10 or more parallel sessions to choose from every day. We estimate that over 200 people participated in BOSC.

The BOSC program

BOSC 2026 had a packed program that included two keynote talks, two panels, 33 talks chosen from submitted abstracts, 44 posters, and two dinners. The complete program can be found on our schedule page.

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. Lee Jia Wei, a PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference.

Thanks to the generous support of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), I had the privilege of attending and presenting a poster at this year’s Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2026), part of the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference. It was truly an eye-opening experience for me, particularly because it was my first international bioinformatics conference, and my first foray into the open bioinformatics community.

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. Neha, a PHD student at University of Newcastle, Australia, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2026.

I feel so grateful to have presented my poster, “Realistic Synthetic Data Generation for Biomedical Research and Computational Modeling in Endometrial Cancer,” on such a large platform. I learned about poster.science, a platform that could help me improve my poster.

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. Anastasia Bratulin, a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the ISMB 2026.

This July, I had the pleasure of attending the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2026 in Washington, D.C., thanks to the event fellowship from Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF). As a well known conference in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics, ISMB brings together researchers from around the world to share advances in genomics, artificial intelligence, and biomedical data science. It was an exciting week filled with talks on how we can standardize data, use AI in our work, and share our findings in a way that is accessible. For a graduate student working in bioinformatics, BOSC (Bioinformatics Open Source Conference) was a great place to learn about the latest developments in biomedical databases, knowledge graphs, and data integration methods. The conference also provided an incredible opportunity to network with experts while seeing firsthand how the field continues to evolve.