The 3rd EMBO Conference on Visualizing Biological Data (VIZBI 2016) - also the 7th international meeting on this topic - will be held 9–11 March 2016 at EMBL Heidelberg in Germany. VIZBI brings together scientists, illustrators, and designers actively using or developing computational visualization to study a diverse range of biological data. The conference features 21 invited talks that will review the state-of-the-art and challenges in visualizing data from genomes, transcripts, proteins, cells, organisms, and populations. Prior to the meeting (Tuesday, 8 March), there will also be tutorials on several visualization tools. All VIZBI 2016 participants have the opportunity to present a poster describing their work. Just before your poster session, you will be given 60 seconds and 2 PowerPoint slides to briefly introduce yourself and your poster to all VIZBI participants.