Each year the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) honors the achievements of an early- to mid-career scientist with the Overton Prize. This prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of Dr. G. Christian Overton, a respected computational biologist and founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors. The Overton Prize recognizes early or mid-career phase scientists who have made significant contributions to computational biology or bioinformatics through their research, teaching, and service. In 2019, ISCB recognized Dr. Christophe Dessimoz, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Professor at the University of Lausanne, Associate Professor at the University College London, and Group Leader at the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics. Dessimoz receives his award and is presenting a keynote address at the 2019 Joint Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology/European Conference on Computational Biology held in Basel, Switzerland on July 21-25, 2019.