ECCB 2026 – Christophe Dessimoz – Executive Director, SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

So, Mr. President of the Swiss Confederation, Madam President of the State Council of Geneva, Madam Rector of the University of Geneva, distinguished representatives of the federal and cantonal authorities, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, we really warmly welcome all of you in Geneva this morning for the 25th edition of the European Conference on Computational Biology. So, on behalf of SIB, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, the whole organizing committee, thank you warmly for joining us. As you know, organizing a conference of this scale is not something that we can do alone, and it will not be possible without the help of many partners. So, I would like to warmly thank the Swiss Secretariat for research, innovation, and education. I would like to also thank the Canton of Geneva, in particular, its Department of Economy. I'd like to thank ELIXIR, as well as our institutional partners and all the private sponsors. I also encourage you to take the opportunity to visit them in the exhibition hall during the conference. So, um this edition of ECCB is very special for several reasons. The first one is that it is the first time ECCB is coming to Geneva. And so, Geneva is a place that is known for its science, but it's also a place known for exchanging ideas, and also international cooperation and where also public policy is in the same place and meets in a very natural way. And so it's also the largest ECCB conference that we know of so far with more than 1,500 participants who are gathered this week here. And so all of us across the SIB community are delighted to welcome you here in Geneva and to Switzerland. So over the coming days we are going to hear excellent talks. We're going to have very stimulating exchanges, meet colleagues from around the world and I hope that we will start many new exciting collaborations. But we also wanted to take the opportunity of this conference to reach beyond our normal kind of scientific community. And so this is why along the conference and together with our partners, the University of Geneva and the Geneva Hospitals, we created Geneva Loves Data. Okay, so this is a a series of public events and in which we invited policy makers, international organization and wider public to discover how biological and biomedical data are really changing research, health, the environment and also of course artificial intelligence. And so you can find the full program on the website genevalovesdata.ch and I've seen some of you have already used the hashtag in social media. Um so we will come back later this morning for why this is so important to have this dialogue, but for now it's time to hear from our distinguished guests. So, the first um person who have kindly accepted Well, we are going to have a series now of people who have kindly invited uh accepted our invitation to speak. And so, first of all, I'm very pleased to invite to the floor uh the president of SIB, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. And as a national counselor, she's also a member of the uh the committee for science, education, and culture of the Swiss Parliament, and a long-standing advocate for science, for innovation, and Switzerland's research excellence. So, please join me in welcoming Mrs. Simone de Montmollin on stage. >> [applause]