announcement of a second ISMB conference at the end of the meeting. ISMB 1994 was initially planned to be held in Seattle. However, a competing meeting forced ISMB to change venues at short notice. The conference was held at Stanford University in August 1994 and was organised by Russ Altman, a research scientist at Stanford University School of Medicine. To emphasise the international aspect of the conference, ISMB 1995 was held at Robinson College, Cambridge. ISMB 1995 also marked a shift in the focus of the conference. ISCB Board member and Director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute Alfonso Valencia has stated that, in 1995, "the conference changed from a computer science-based conference to a point where everyone realized that, if you want to make progress, there has to be more focus in biology." Formation of ISCB and expansion ISMB 1997 was held in Halkidiki, Greece and marked the foundation of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). ISCB was formed with a focus on managing all scientific, organizational and financial aspects of the ISMB conference and to provide a forum for scientists to address the emerging role of computers in the biological sciences. ISCB has assisted in organising the ISMB conference series since 1998. The period following the formation of ISCB also marked an expansion in the number of ISMB attendees: ISMB 2000 (held at the University of California, San Diego) was attended by over 1,000 delegates, submitting 141 scientific papers. This meeting was also the last time ISMB would be held at a university, due to size limitations. Partnership with ECCB In 2004, ISMB was jointly held with the European Conference on Computational Biology for the first time. The conference was also co-located with the Genes, Proteins and Computers conference. This meeting, held in Glasgow, UK, was the largest bioinformatics conference ever held, attended by 2,136 delegates, submitting 496 scientific papers. Alfonso Valencia considers ISMB/ECCB 2004 to be an important milestone in the history of ISMB: "it was the first one where the balance between Europe and the States became an important part of the conference. It was here that we established the rules and the ways and the spirit of collaboration between the Americans and the Europeans." The success of the joint conference paved the way for future European ISMB meetings to be held jointly with ECCB. Recent meetings By the end of 2006, ISCB was in