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.

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. Aditya Karna, an undergraduate student at Springfield College, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2026.

Attending BOSC/ISMB 2026 in Washington, D.C with support from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation Event fellowship was a very rewarding milestone for me. This was my first time being in a space where open-source software, biology, data infrastructure, and the research community all came together in one place. I had followed some of these ideas from the outside before, but being there in person made the work feel much more real.

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. Francesco Maria Antonio Micocci, a Undergraduate Student at University Of Turin, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the BITS2026 Conference and BioHackathon2026.

Attending a conference for the first time and as an undergraduate student can be really intimidating. Finding yourself in rooms filled with affirmed researchers and topics you’ve not studied before. That was exactly the situation I found myself in at the recent Biohackathon and BITS2026 in the beautiful city of Padova.

The call for applications for round 2 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2026 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 August 2026. 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 OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events that promote open-source bioinformatics and/or open science. We invite applications from candidates seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events between September 2026 to August 2027. These events include conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

BOSC has organized CoFests every year before or after ISMB since 2010. This year, CoFest will take place after ISMB 2026 on Friday, July 17 and Saturday, July 18 (9am-5pm each day). The location is in central Washington, D.C. (not far from the ISMB location); the exact address will be shared with those who register. There will be limited opportunities for virtual participation; videoconferencing is not guaranteed but participants will be able to interact on Slack.