8th ISCB Student Council Symposium at ISMB 2012 in California, USA

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The 8th ISCB Student Council Symposium was held in California, USA om the 13th of July 2012, directly preceding Tutorials' Day of ISMB 2012. The event started with a scientific speed dating session in which participantsintroduced themselves and their science to a new person every two minutes. The traditional scientific component of the meeting consisted of three sessions, each with a keynote talk and several student presentations. In the evening, everybody got the opportunity to present their work during the poster session.
SCS2012's keynote lectures were kindly delivered by Dr. Robin Dowell (University of Colorado at Boulder), Dr. Matthew Hibbs (University of Maine at The Jackson Laboratory), and Dr. Jonathan Eisen (University of California, Davis). Furthermore, three institutional partners gave short presentations about career opportunities at their respective institute:NICTA, EBI and EMBO.
The SCS2012 symposium received 103 submissions from students. These submissions were peer-reviewed by 56 independent reviewers. Ten abstracts were selected for oral presentation and approximately 50 additional abstracts were accepted for poster presentations. Highlights from 8th ISCB Student Council Symposium were published as a special issue in BMC Bioinformatics.

7th ISCB Student Council Symposium at ISMB/ECCB 2011 in Vienna, Austria

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The 7th ISCB Student Council Symposium was held in Vienna on July 15th 2011, directly preceding the tutorials' day of ISMB/ECCB 2011. The event was extremely successfull, with over 85 delegates attending, enjoying a selection of excellent student presentations and keynote lectures. The day opened with a "scientific speed date", allowing the students to introduce themselves before the lectures started, and closed with a rich poster session. During the day 10 selected students gave presentations about their research, covering a wide range of topics and giving very different perspectives. We were honored to host the keynotes Chad Myers (University of Minnesota), Ivet Bahar (University of Pittsburgh) and Curtis Huttenhower (Harvard School of Public Health) that gave three excellent and inspiring lectures. Three students taking part in the Student Council Internship Program gave a snapshot of their experience. The Student Council Symposium committee was able to provide 12 travel fellowships in order to support students participating in the event. Highlights from 7th ISCB Student Council Symposium were published as a special issue in BMC Bioinformatics and a snapshot of the event is rendered in this short video.

6th ISCB Student Council Symposium at ISMB 2010 in Boston, USA

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The 6th ISCB Student Council Symposium (SCS6) was a good opportunity for students to meet their peers from all over the world for an exchange of ideas and networking. Exciting new research results were presented by 12 student authors who submitted outstanding work to the symposium. More than 30 young researchers volunteered to review 94 abstracts. A wide range of research areas was covered and the poster session also offered exciting science in various domains. In addition, we were honored to have Gary Bader (University of Toronto), David Altshuler (Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard) and Larry Hunter (University of Colorado) as keynote speakers.To support the symposium delegates, the Student Council provided no less than 18 travel fellowships, including four full fellowships of 2,500 USD each for students from developing countries. SCS6 also introduced a Scientific Speed Dating session to start the day in an informal and friendly way, which was a great success! Watch the video here!

5th ISCB Student Council Symposium at ISMB/ECCB 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden

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Commemorating its 5th anniversary, the ISCB Student Council Symposium (SCS5) was a great success. We are proud to have significantly impacted the student computational biology community by providing young researchers an international platform to present their findings. A total of eight oral presentations by students were selected on the basis of the outstanding quality of their submitted abstracts. More than 120 delegates registered for the June 27th SCS5 in Stockholm. The organizing committee went to great lengths to secure funds and was able to provide nine travel fellowships for students. An impressive array of invited speakers included keynote addresses by this years ISCB Overton Prize awardee Trey Ideker, as well as Michal Linial and Peer Bork. We introduced a new section in SCS5 where Wolfgang Huber prepared a tutorial on a specific application of R/Bioconductor package. The event also involved a panel discussion on Bioinformatics in the era of personal genomics, a poster session and reception. With more than 40 reviewers, over 100 abstracts and 50 travel fellowship applications were reviewed. A short video about SCS5.

4th ISCB Student Council Symposium at ISMB 2008 in Toronto, Canada

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Now in its 4th year the ISCB Student Council Symposium has again made an impact in the Computational Biology community. Around 100 student delegates attended the event in Toronto on July 18th where ISCB President Burkhard Rost (Columbia University), Mark Gerstein (Yale University) and Timothy Hughes (University of Toronto) delivered the keynote addresses. The students also listened to presentations by nine of their peers, who had been selected based on the outstanding quality of their submitted abstracts. The program was complemented by a panel discussion on “Career paths in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics” followed by a poster session and reception.
Conference chairs Lucia Peixoto and Amr Abuzeid and their team had raised almost $17,500 from sponsors, which allowed the Student Council to support seven outstanding students with travel fellowships worth $1,000 each. More than 40 applications for these travel fellowships had been submitted. The program committee led by Sarath Chandra Janga reviewed a total of 75 submissions for the symposium. The organizers were very pleased with the quality of the submitted abstracts, which has been increasing consistently over the last few years. Selected outstanding abstracts from the symposium were published in a BMC Bioinformatics supplement.

3rd ISCB Student Council Symposium at ISMB/ECCB 2007 in Vienna, Austria

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Several distinguished scientists were invited to the symposium, including Janet Thornton (European Bioinformatics Institute) who presented the opening keynote on "Comparative Functional Genomics of Ageing" and Anna Tramontano (University of Rome, La Sapienza) who gave a keynote lecture on the "Advances and Pitfalls of Structural Bioinformatics". ISCB Vice President Reinhard Schneider (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) delivered the closing remarks.
For students and young scientists it is crucial to be aware of the directions in which the field is moving to make the right career decisions. The symposium addressed this challenge by providing two different perspectives on bioinformatics: During two presentation sessions and a poster session student delegates were given the opportunity to learn about the latest research of their peers. Another, more comprehensive, view on the development of the field was provided through aforementioned keynote lectures and a panel discussion on "The Future of Bioinformatics" moderated by Thomas Lengauer (Max Planck Institute for Informatics). Several accomplished senior scientists were on the panel, namely Rita Casadio (University of Bologna), Tan Tin Wee (National University of Singapore), Janet Thornton (European Bioinformatics Institute) and Anna Tramontano (University of Rome, La Sapienza). The discussion was highly interactive, providing delegates with the opportunity to actively contribute and to ask questions. In addition, attendees were able to learn first-hand about personal experiences of some of the scientists that have shaped the field of computational biology.

2nd ISCB Student Council Symposium at ISMB 2006 in Fortaleza, Brazil

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The success of the symposium in 2005 encouraged the leadership of the ISCB Student Council to organize a very similar event as part of ISMB 2006 in Fortaleza, Brazil. Even though the symposium was held on the same day as the tutorials of ISMB over 80 delegates registered for this event, which had a strong focus on career-development and networking within the bioinformatics community. Keynote speakers Phil Bourne, Reinhard Schneider and Julio Collado-Vides dedicated time to these issues in their keynote presentations, while then-ISCB President Michael Gribskov discussed his vision of where computational biology is heading in the 21st century in his closing remarks.
Many students and young researchers used the opportunity to present their work at the event and submitted more than 35 abstracts. The best 10 were selected for oral presentation, while a poster session allowed also the remaining submitters to present their work. Awards were given to the authors of the best presentation and the best poster. The day was closed by a social event in one of Fortaleza's best steakhouses, which was another highlight of this very successful 2nd ISCB Student Council Symposium.

1st ISCB Student Council Symposium at ECCB 2005 in Madrid, Spain

The 1st ISCB Student Council Symposium was held on 28th of September immediately preceding ECCB 2005 in Madrid. We initiated the review process of student abstracts and were pleasantly surprised by the quality and quantity of abstracts submitted. We received over 60 abstracts in 7 different categories covering a wide range of topics within computational biology. From these we selected 20 for oral presentation on the symposium and another 36 for poster presentations at ECCB.