The ISCB Student Council is led by an Executive Team composed of a Chair, Vice Chair, Treasurer, Secretary, and ISCB Board of Directors Representative. The Executive Team is elected by the Student Council membership body for a one-year term. In case you haven't had an opportunity to meet our talented and dedicated student leaders, we'd like to introduce them to you:

• Darbha Anupama Jigisha, Chair
• Umesh Nandal, Vice Chair
• Cynthia Prudence, Treasurer
• Margherita Francescatto, Secretary
• Avinash Kumar Shanmugan, ISCB Board of Directors Representative

You can also read more about former executive team members. For a summary of the responsibilities of our officers, please visit ISCB Student Council Elections.

Darbha Anupama Jigisha, Chair

"My goals for the coming year are to continue the excellent work of past teams and increase the impact of the student council on the student community of computational biology." — Anupama Jigisha

Email Anupama, Visit her LinkedIn page.

Anupama is currently a graduate student in bioinformatics at the University of Geneva and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in Geneva, Switzerland. With plans to pursue a PhD in Bioinformatics, Anupama's work focuses on yeast genomics and proteomics, and to this end her research encompasses data integration, statistical analysis and comparative studies. She hopes to eventually delve into viral genomics and wishes to see herself contributing significantly to the society through scientific research.

Anupama has been a member of the Regional Student Group India (RSG India) since 2008. She served as an RSG India team manager, and continued to contribute to the group as an advisor after her term ended. In 2009, Anupama received an ISCB Student Council travel fellowship to attend ISMB 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden, where she was able to interact with other members of the Student Council. Soon after, she joined the Student Council Finance Committee, and went on to become the committee chair for the next 2 years. As the finance chair, Anupama organized funds for Student Council Symposia in 2011 (Vienna) and 2012 (Boston) and for European Student Council Symposium 2012 (Basel). Through 2011 and 2012, she prepared the Student Council budget, recruited sponsors and drafted grants to meet the student body's financial needs.

The ISCB Student Council and RSG India are the first student groups Anupama has been involved in. For her, they have proven to be invaluable resources and support systems. Since she joined RSG India, she believes she has acquired valuable professional and interpersonal skills, and learned how to manage projects and responsibilities more effectively. She has been able to hone these skills further through her involvement with the Student Council, and has no doubt that she will continue to learn as a member of the executive team. Being part of this international organization has also given her the opportunity to network with her peers, discuss academic interests and concerns.

Anupama's goals for the coming year are to continue the excellent work of past teams and increase the impact of the student council on the student community of computational biology. With the help of the executive team, she aspires to increase membership, funding resources, awareness of the student council activities and also bring new opportunities to students in the field.

Umesh Nandal, Vice Chair

"My goal is to continue expanding the network of young researchers around the world and connect those that are working in the same area of bioinformatics."
— Umesh Nandal

Email Umesh, Visit his LinkedIn page.

Umesh is the final year PhD candidate at the Bioinformatics laboratory at Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam. The objective of his research work is to validate animal models for human diseases. He is developing a methodology that efficiently determines conservations and dissimilarities between human and its model organism at the level of molecular networks. The outcome of his research would help in better understanding of fundamental mechanism underlying the human diseases.

Umesh has always been fascinated by computer science and after finishing his Masters in Chemistry with certification in computer science from Delhi University, India he decided to switch to Bioinformatics. To further his career in this area he then moved to the Netherlands in 2010 to obtain doctorate degree in bioinformatics.

Umesh came across with ISCB Student Council (SC) when he attended his first PhD retreat in 2010 organized by Regional Student Group (RSG) Netherlands prior to the Netherlands Bioinformatics (NBIC) conference. He was amazed by the fact that there is an active student group in the field of bioinformatics that could provide him a platform to connect to other young researchers within the Netherlands and he immediately joined RSG Netherlands as the board member. He started getting involved more in SC activities to explore the bioinformatics student’s network around the globe. He actively participated in organizing SC symposium in 2011 Vienna, Austria and chaired the social event in SC symposium 2012 in Los Angles, USA. Since 2012 he has been the president of RSG Netherlands.

Being elected as the vice-chair of student council for 2013, his goal is to continue expanding the current network of young researchers around the world and connect those that are working in the same areas in the field of bioinformatics.

Cynthia Prudence, Treasurer

"My primary goal is to increase funding to provide more opportunities for students to engage into both scientific and social events." — Cynthia Prudence

Email Cynthia,Visit Cynthia's LinkedIn page.

Cynthia Prudence is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Mathematical Sciences with a Biophysics and Bioinformatics focus at the University of Rhode Island (URI). She previously completed a Masters degree in Computer Science in 2012 as well a Graduate Certificate in Digital Forensics in August of 2011. Her Ph.D. studies are under the guidance of Professors Yana Reshetnyak and Oleg Andreev of the Division of Biological and Medical Physics in the Department of Physics at URI. Cynthia's research incorporates protein-protein interaction, computational modeling, and bioinformatics. Ultimately, she would like to continue working in this area as well as explore opportunities that will expand her research repertoire.

Cynthia has presented work at various conferences in the United States and abroad. She was a Sloan Research Fellow (2008--2009) and is a multiple awardee of the New England Board of Higher Education Fellowship (Spring 2005 - 2006, Spring 2007 - 2008, Spring 2010 - Spring 2011) and most recently an NSF XSEDE scholar (2011-2012)

Cynthia first became involved in the ISCB Student Council when she attended 3DSIG2010 in Boston. Over the next two years, she worked on various committees, meeting many new people from all over the world. She is happy to take a greater role in helping the SC grow and expand. Cynthia's primary goal for her term is to increase funding to provide more opportunities for students to engage into both scientific and social events.

Margherita Francescatto, Secretary

"Being enthusiastic about how much the SC achieved in the past years I believe that something more should be done to ensure structure and continuity to the several committees and great activities associated."
— Margherita Francescatto

Email Margherita, Visit her LinkedIn page.

Margherita is currently in the process of finishing her PhD. In the last years she had the unique opportunity to travel a lot, studying and working in a broad range of countries and groups. She is now settling at the German Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Tübingen, after finishing her masters in Italy and passing by Portugal, Netherlands and Japan. Her scientific interests focus on transcription in the human brain and on the role of transcriptional changes in the development of major neurodegenerative diseases.

Margherita has been a member of RSG Netherlands since 2011, when the group presented itself as a brilliant opportunity to get in touch with other students in the fields of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. In particular the group was the perfect answer to her "working loneliness", being her the only computational person in a mainly wet-lab group. She immediately wanted to get involved in the board and soon became RSG Netherlands secretary.

Through the RSG Netherlands channel Margherita discovered that a big computational biology conference was going to take place in Vienna in July 2011 and in this big conference there would be an entire day dedicated to a symposium organized by students for students! She went there and immediately fell in love with the ISCB Student Council initiative. Her first active contribution to the SC was chairing the Website and Publicity Committee for the Student Council Symposium 2012.

Margherita is now the secretary of the ISCB Student Council, and she's involved as well in RSG and Internship Committees. Being enthusiastic about how much the SC achieved in the past years she believes that something more should be done to ensure structure and continuity to the several committees and great activities associated. She's also looking forward to help the inter-communication between the many RSGs of Europe area and follow the expansion of the Internship Program.

Avinash Kumar Shanmugam, ISCB Board of Directors Representative

"My objective is to continue the efforts by the last Executive team to better document Student council operations." — Avinash Kumar Shanmugam

Email Avinash, Visit his LinkedIn page.

Avinash is a PhD student in the Bioinformatics graduate program at the University of Michigan working in the lab of Dr. Alexey Nesvizhskii . He is currently working on developing methods for the integrative analysis of data from Proteomics, Transcriptomics and other sources. In the long term he hopes to work on cool and interesting projects, either in industry or academia.

Avinash first got involved with the ISCB Student council in 2007 first as a volunteer with RSG-India before going on to become President of RSG-India. He greatly enjoyed his experiences with RSG India and at the Student council and so gladly accepted the nomination to join the Executive Team of the Student council as RSG committee chair in 2010. He particularly appreciates the opportunity to be involved in initiatives that can make small but meaningful impacts around the world, such as through the RSG funding program and the Internships program. The fact that you get to do this while meeting a bunch of interesting and dedicated people from around the world makes it even better.

For this year, Avinash hopes to build upon the excellent work by previous leaderships. Apart from keeping the ISCB Board of Directors informed about the work of the Student Council and offering general advice in the Executive team, his personal objective is to continue the efforts by the last Executive team to better document Student council operations.