10 years ago ISME started The ISME Journal, a great adventure with a fantastic outcome that we have enjoyed and hopefully will continue to enjoy for many more years to come.  
We thank all of our members for your support and contributions, we couldn’t have been so successful without you!

To highlight our journal anniversary, the founding editors George Kowalchuk and Mark Bailey have written a special commentary in the May issue and we have launched an online focus with a celebration video and a selection of recent ISMEJ articles that reflect our journal at its best.

More celebrations will be held next year at ISME17 in Leipzig as we then also celebrate the 25^th year anniversary of the Society and 40^th year anniversary of our Symposia. Good times ahead!


Colin Murrell - ISME President
 

The ISME Journal Cover Competition

It is that time of the year again! Submit your microbial artwork and win the ISMEJ cover competition of 2017
A new cover image for next years' issues of The ISME Journal is needed, will it be your artwork? Send in your best work before August 31 2017 and perhaps your submission will be on next years' cover!

It is easy to join the game: During the summer you can submit/send your images to our office (please find the guidelines below). Once the submission deadline is passed our jury (chief editors & editorial office) will select a top 3. These 3 finalists will be displayed on our website and members are then invited to vote!

Of course the winner receives a free ISME membership (2018) which includes 12 hardcopy issues of The ISME Journal (with their own artwork on the cover for a whole year)!
 

Want to host ISME in 2022? We are now open to receive bids

ISME17 will take place in Leipzig, Germany, next year, followed by ISME18 in Cape Town, South Africa in 2020. But what about ISME19 in 2022? 

If you are interested in hosting our symposium in your city or country then check out how to apply on our website. The winner will be announced next year during the closing ceremony at ISME17. For your information, here is a list of previous venues of ISME:

ISME Ambassadors' Reports

As many of you already know, every year ISME provides an Ambassadors' budget to help support local events in microbial ecology and activities that help to raise the profile of microbial ecology and the society. The Ambassador program is steadily growing with €6K support provided by the society in 2015, €7.5K support in 2016 and €8K committed already in the 1^st 6 months of 2017.  Microbial ecologists can contact their regional ISME ambassador and apply for the funding via our website. In return for the support we ask for a report on the event that describes how the funding was used. This time we wish to highlight a recent event in Cameroon. Ambassador Prof. Fankem Henri briefly shares his experience with us below and the full report can be found on our website. 

CONFERENCE SCIENTIFIQUE DES DOCTORANTS ET JEUNES CHERCHEURS DES  UNIVERSITES d’ETAT ET INSTITUTS de RECHERCHE date: 14-15 June 2017

The conference of Doctorates and young scientists from the state and private universities and research institutes took place at the Faculty of Science, The University of Douala from 14-15 June 2017. ISME was represented by the ISME Ambassador and two invited Doctorates working on microbial ecology.

During the closing ceremony on 15th June, the ISME Ambassador was given the opportunity to briefly present ISME, following the awarding of ISME prizes to 6 of the 25 best participants in a range of activities coordinated by the organizing committee. In general, we were very satisfied by our participation in the conference and hope that we will be able to further the reach of ISME in other conferences in Cameroon and why not out of Cameroon? Fankem Henri ISME Ambassador

the grantees

ISME Awards

ISME is very pleased to announce that the 2018 Jim Tiedje Award winner is Prof. Michael Wagner (Universtity of Vienna, Austria). 

This award is given in recognition of a lifetime contribution to microbial ecology and is celebrated with a dedicated reception and evening lecture during ISME17 in August 2018, in Leipzig. Previous recipients of the Tiedje Award are Sally Chisholm, Nancy Moran, Stephen Giovannoni, Bo Barker Jorgensen, Norman Pace, Gijs Kuenen and Farooq Azam.

Furthermore, Dr. Catherine Lozupone (University of Colorado, USA) has been awarded the 2018 ISME Young Investigators Award.
This award will also be handed out during ISME17 and recognizes young scientists who have made a significant contribution to microbial ecology. Previous winners are Gene Tyson, Ruth Ley, Victoria Orphan, Marc Strous, Forest Rohwer, Phil Hugenholtz and Ian Head.  

Congratulations to both winners!
 

Events in Microbial Ecology