Ian Lawson Van Toch Memorial Award for Outstanding Student Paper at ISMB conferences
The Outstanding Student Paper Award is given to the student who presents the most thought-provoking or original paper at the Conference, as judged by the panel of experts.

This award is given in memory of Ian Lawson Van Toch, a 23 year old Medical Biophysics graduate student at the University of Toronto who passed away in August 2007. Ian was fortunate to have already discovered his passion for computational biology and how it can - and will - lead to quantum breakthroughs in cancer research. This passion was sparked when Dr. Igor Jurisica hired Ian to work in his lab at the Ontario Cancer Institute as a researcher during the summer of 2006. That introduction blossomed into a mentoring relationship that is so vital to helping young students launch their careers.
ISMB 2008 - Toronto
Lucas Ward, Columbia University, United States; (Next position: PDF at MIT)

Predicting functional transcription factor binding through alignment-free and affinity-based analysis of orthologous promoter sequences

Current position: Bioinformatics Scientist II at 5AM Solutions, Inc., Rockville, MD & Research Affiliate at MIT
ISMB 2009 - Stockholm
Manfred Claassen, ETH Zurich, Switzerland; (Next position: PDF at Stanford University;

Proteome coverage prediction with infinite Markov models

Current position: Assistant Prof. at The Institute of Molecular Systems Biology at the ETH Zurich
ISMB 2010 - Boston
Keren Yizhak, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Integrating quantitative proteomics and metabolomics with a genome-scale metabolic network mode

Current position: Assistant Professor at Technio, Israel Institute of Technology
ISMB 2011 - Vienna
Sara Berthoumieux, INRIA, France

Identification of metaboloic network models from incomplete high-throughput datasets

Current position: Head of Data & IT at ENDODIAG, Paris, France, Paris, France
ISMB 2012 - Long Beach
Deniz Yorukoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

Dissect: Detection and Characterization of Novel Structural Alterations in Transcribed Sequences
ISMB 2013 - Berlin
Wyatt Clark, Indiana University, United States

Information-theoretic evaluation of predicted ontological annotations

Current position: Scientist I, Cellular Genetics, Research & Development, BioMarin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Novato, California
ISMB 2014 - Boston
Andrey D. Prjibelski, St. Petersburg University of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia

ExSPAnder: a Universal Repeat Resolver for DNA Fragment Assembly

Current position: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Computer Science, Algorithmic Bioinformatics, University of Helsinki, Finland
ISMB 2015 - Dublin
Farhad Hormozdiari, UCLA, United States

Identification of causal genes for complex traits

Current position: Research Scientist at Google Health
ISMB 2016 - Orlando
Yaron Orenstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

RCK: accurate and efficient inference of sequence and structure-based protein-RNA binding models from RNAcompete data

Current position: Associate Professor of Computer Science and Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University
ISMB 2017 - Prague
Kymberleigh Pagel, Indiana University, United States

When loss-of-function is loss of function: Assessing mutational signatures and impact of loss-of-function genetic variants

Current position: Genomics Data Scientist, SpinSys, Baltimore, Maryland
ISMB 2018 - Chicago
Rani Powers, University of Colorado, Denver, United States

GSEA-InContext: Identifying novel and common patterns in expression experiments

Current position: Current position: Founder & CEO at Pluto, Denver, Colorado
ISMB 2019 - Basel
Torsten Gross, IRI Life Sciences, Humboldt University, Germany

Robust network inference using response logic
ISMB 2019 - Basel
Dinithi Sumanaweera, Monash University, Australia

Statistical Compression of Protein Sequences and Inference of Marginal Probability Landscapes over Competing Alignments using Finite State Models and Dirichlet Priors

Current position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Wellcome Sanger Institute
ISMB 2020 - Montreal
Yannik Schalte, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Technical University Munich, Institute of Computational Biology, Germany

Efficient exact inference for dynamical systems with noisy measurements using seqeuntial approximate Bayesian computation

Current position: Team leader, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
ISMB 2021 - Virtual
Jamshed Khan, University of Meryland, United States

Cuttlefish: Fast, parallel, and low-memory compaction of de Bruijn graphs from large-scale genome collections
ISMB 2022 - Madison, WI
Quentin Garrido, Université Gustave Eiffel, ESIEE Paris, LIGM, France

Visualizing hierarchies in scRNA-seq data using a density tree-biased autoencoder
ISMB 2023 - Lyon, France
Cassandra Burdziak, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, United States

scKINETICS: inference of regulatory velocity with single-cell transcriptomics data