Conference: Computational Modeling in Biology Network (COMBINE) 2026 Workshop

COMBINE 2026 is a workshop-style event with invited lectures, oral presentations and posters, with dedicated time for afternoon breakout sessions to foster community interactions and engage trainees from various disciplines. The workshop will take place September 7-10, 2026 on the campus of the Keele University in Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire, United Kingdom. The goal is to coordinate and develop various community standards and formats in systems biology and related fields. The intended outcome of workshop interactions will enable the community to improve collective understanding of the landscape of tools and standards that exist for systems biology. The four meeting days will include talks from leaders in systems biology fields that are bioengineers, modelers, model users, and experimentalists collaborating with modelers. Model standards facilitate science in that results encoded in standard formats are more readily reproducible and reduce the need to reinvent or duplicate efforts. Trust-worthy models improve model sharing and increase useability, a critical step to disseminating models and making modeling more pervasive in basic and translational molecular and cellular biology. Societal impact arises through strengthening of systems biology analyses would provide quantitative and predictive frameworks for engineering complex biological systems enabling improved bioprocesses. Trainees are integrated into the workshop proceedings and could contribute abstracts for specific workshop activities. COMBINE 2026 will provide students with a unique opportunity to interact with national and international researchers to enhance and foster new collaborations around standards for data representation and exchange in biology. This workshop will be a valuable educational experience for student participants. COMBINE 2026 will take place September 7-10, 2026 on the campus of the Keele University in Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire, United Kingdom. The event is workshop-styled with invited lectures, oral presentations and posters, with dedicated time for afternoon breakout sessions to foster community interactions and engage trainees from various disciplines. The goal is to coordinate and develop various community standards and formats in systems biology and related fields. The intended outcome of workshop interactions will enable the community to improve collective understanding of the landscape of tools and standards that exist. In addition, the systems biology community will be able to identify immediate and future gaps that need prioritization. The COMBINE workshop is organized into five types of activities: invited talks, short talks/lightning talks, poster presentations, demonstrations/tutorials, and breakout sessions. Invited and selected talks from contributed abstracts will take place during the common plenary session and posters will be displayed during a dedicated poster session during the meeting. Breakout sessions and tutorial sessions will be contributed by the community and can be on a range of topics, including hacking and/or detailed discussions on certain aspects of one or several of the COMBINE standard(s). In addition, topics such as metadata and semantic annotations (format-specific or overarching), application and implementations of the COMBINE standards, or any other topic relevant for the COMBINE community, could be included. Model standards will facilitate science in that results encoded in standards are more readily reproducible. Improving model sharing, reproducibility and useability is a critical step to disseminating models and making models more pervasive in systems and synthetic biology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2629009 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Elebeoba May | Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison, MADISON, WI | Award Amount: $7,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2629009 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2629009.html