Faculty, students and a postdoc from the University of Maryland's Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB) will deliver talks, present posters and give a keynote address at the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), July 12–16 in Washington, D.C. The conference is the flagship meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology and the world's largest gathering devoted to computational biology and bioinformatics.
Leading Maryland's participation is Mihai Pop, MPower Professor of Computer Science and a member of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), who is serving as co-chair of the 2026 conference. Pop also will deliver the Distinguished Keynote Address at the ISCB Youth Bioinformatics Symposium, a companion event introducing middle- and high-school students to computational biology and bioinformatics.
In his keynote, My Long and Winding Road to Computational Microbiome Analytics, Pop will reflect on the unexpected path that led him to computational microbiome research, sharing lessons from both successes and setbacks before offering advice to students beginning careers in science.
Other CBCB faculty and students will present research spanning genomics, microbiology, artificial intelligence and evolutionary biology.
Rob Patro, professor of computer science and a member of UMIACS, will present Optimizing Sparse and Skew Hashing: Faster k-mer Dictionaries during the High Throughput Sequencing Algorithms & Applications session on Monday. The research introduces a faster data structure for searching massive genomic datasets while providing new theoretical insights into computational performance.
Patro's doctoral student, Liz Hunter, will present Quantifying Classification Stability Under Reference Database Perturbation during the Microbiome session on Monday. Her research examines how changes in genomic reference databases affect the accuracy of metagenomic classification tools and introduces a method for estimating confidence in those classifications.
Erin Molloy, assistant professor of computer science and a member of UMIACS, has two graduate students presenting talks. Wenshan Wu will present research on evaluating cluster stability in spatial transcriptomics during the BioVis session Tuesday, while Yunzhuo Liu will describe how species tree shape influences computational method performance during the EvolCompGen session Wednesday.
Can Firtina, assistant professor of computer science and a member of UMIACS, will be represented by two undergraduate students. Simon Ambrozak will present CRANE: Correcting Errors in Raw Nanopore Signals Using Hidden Markov Models on Tuesday, describing a method that reduces sequencing errors by correcting noisy electrical signals before downstream analysis. Bhargav Srinivasan will present a poster describing a deep learning framework capable of identifying a broad range of epigenetic modifications from nanopore sequencing data without requiring specialized training data.
Additional researchers affiliated with CBCB will contribute throughout the conference. Graduate students Dinithi Wikramaratne, Nathalie Bonin and Rain Haworth will present posters, along with Anning Cui, who recently completed her undergraduate degree. Postdoctoral researcher Markus Fedarko and graduate student Adena Collens will give presentations on data visualization and bioinformatics education, respectively.
—Story by UMIACS communications group