Hagit Shatkay elected to appointments with international organizations

The University of Delaware’s Hagit Shatkay has been elected to the board of directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).

An associate professor in UD’s Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Shatkay has also been appointed a member of the Computer Science Evaluation Panel of the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Both of the appointments are for three years.

International Society for Computational Biology

ISCB is the leading, largest and longest-standing international society for bioinformatics and computational biology, aiming to advance the understanding of living systems through computation and to communicate scientific advances worldwide.

The society has thousands of members worldwide; its board comprises 26 leading international scientists in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. Board members come from prominent institutions throughout the world, including MIT, Stanford, the Max Planck Institute, and University College London. New board members are nominated and elected by ISCB peers, based on recognized leadership in the field, and are voted on by the current board.

“It is an honor to be nominated and elected to the board of directors and to have the opportunity to serve the field and to shape its future direction,” Shatkay says.

National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada

NSERC, Canada’s primary federal funding agency for university-based research, supports a broad range of programs in the natural sciences and engineering. Shatkay’s appointment as a panel member involves evaluating applications for the Discovery Grants Program, which is NSERC’s flagship funding program.

The panel consists primarily of leading researchers from prominent Canadian universities, with a few invited members from other countries. The four current U.S. members include Shatkay and faculty from Caltech, Virginia Tech, and the University of Texas.

About the professor

Shatkay’s research interests include biomedical literature mining, and the application of machine learning approaches to a variety of biomedical data. Before joining UD in 2010, she was an associate professor at Queen’s University in Ontario. She is currently a visiting faculty member at Johns Hopkins, where she is working with cardiologists to develop predictive models for diagnosing heart disease. Among other projects, she also collaborates with physicians at Christiana Care to improve care for patients with chronic kidney disease.