Christoph Bock receives Overton Prize
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We congratulate CeMM PI Christoph Bock on being awarded the 2017 Overton Prize of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB). Each year, this prestigious award is given to one early to mid-career scientist from any country who is recognized as an emerging leader in computational biology and bioinformatics.
Christoph Bock has been one of the first computational biologists who dedicated his career to understanding epigenetics and the human epigenome. During his PhD in the lab of Thomas Lengauer at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2004-2008), he developed pioneering methods and software for analyzing and interpreting DNA methylation data. As postdoc in the laboratory of Alexander Meissner at the Broad Institute (2009-2011), he conducted large-scale epigenome analyses of stem cells and contributed to the Roadmap Epigenomics project.
Since 2012, Christoph Bock has been a Principal Investigator at CeMM and a Visiting Professor at the Medical University of Vienna. His research on epigenetic biomarker development helped established the practical value of epigenetics for personalized medicine. He has also been one of the lead bioinformaticians in the BLUEPRINT epigenome project and the International Human Epigenome Consortium. Christoph Bock received an ERC Starting Grant in 2015 and a New Frontier Group award by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2013.
In the light of these achievements, the ISCB’s announcement of the 2017 Overton Prize highlights Christoph Bock as “a rising star in epigenetic data analysis.”
The Overton Prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of G. Christian Overton, a leading bioinformatics researcher and a founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors. Over the last 16 years, the prize has been awarded to an outstanding group of computational biologists (https://www.iscb.org/iscb-awards/overton-prize).
The ISCB is the world’s leading professional society for computational biology and bioinformatics. It seeks to communicate the significance of computational biology to the larger scientific community, to governmental organizations, and to the general public; the society serves its members locally, nationally, and internationally; it provides guidance for scientific policies, publications, meetings, and distributes information through multiple platforms.