As of 1-1-2015 the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science at the Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas has been merged with the Computational Medicine Laboratory to yield the Computational BioMedicine Laboratory (http://www.ics.forth.gr/cbml ) . The new laboratory’s Head is Dr. Kostas Marias.

As the Head of the former Bioinformatics Laboratory, I (Prof. Tsamardinos) would like to thank the members of the lab, that gave their 100% to make it a highly successful (even if short lived) lab. I am forever in debt to them for their continuous efforts, grateful for their choice to join despite the risks and uncertainty that it entailed, and honored to have been the Head of the group.

The Bioinformatics Laboratory was founded in 2011 with only 16K euro in funding. During the 4 years of the lab (2011-2014), we attracted more than 1.1M euro, reached a maximum size of 19 personnel, got more than 2000 citations to our published work, published papers in forums ranging from ICML, UAI, JMLR to NAR and Cell Metabolism and presented invited talks to prominent Universities, groups and conferences around the world.

A few words about the future and how the merge affects the MXM group. The merge presents new opportunities for the MXM members to collaborate with the other members of the CBML laboratory, including joint publications and funded projects which we intend to explore. In addition, it reduces the administrative load on Prof. Tsamardinos. The new ERC grant CAUSALPATH that just started this year is a major current activity of the MXM group and is hosted in the University of Crete. Thus, a large part of the MXM research activities will be de-facto moving in the University of Crete.

We would like to extend our best wishes to the new laboratory and its Head and express our eagerness to contribute to its success.