ISCB Student Council Newsletter

The ISCB Student Council's Winter 2016/2017 Newsletter

While the Spring 2016 newsletter marked the 12th anniversary of the ISCB Student Council (SC), our latest Winter 2016/2017 Issue marks the change of the current Student Council’s Executive Team (ET) after two wonderful years of hard work. In addition, the newsletter highlights some of the momentous events of 2016.

The first article in our Winter Issue outlines inspiring developments and accomplishments of our Regional Student Groups (RSGs). RSGs, located across the world, are working actively to strengthen collaborative efforts within the sphere of computational biology and bioinformatics. The article provides a summary of productive approaches that RSGs are utilising to develop community of current and future bioinformaticians. Read the full article here.

The 12th annual Student Council Symposium (SCS), held in Orlando (Florida, USA) this year, turned out to be a huge success. The symposium was packed with valuable advice and great scientific content for both PhD students and early-career scientists. Let's have a look at the highlights of SCS 2016.

The third article in our latest issue highlights the 4th European Student Council Symposium (ESCS) that took place in The Hague, Netherlands. ESCS 2016 was part of the 15th European Conferences on Computational Biology, and had a great audience of PhD students and postdocs that presented research covering diverse topics within bioinformatics and systems biology. Get the full details of ESCS 2016 here.

Before passing the leadership torch to the recently elected ET, the SC's current ET has shared some of the recent accomplishments and activities of the SC such as an increase in the number of RSGs, a survey conducted among RSGs to obtain their feedback, our community forum, knowledge transfer, and our website. Read more about it here.

Written by:

Alexandre Borrel (@AlBorrel), Alexander Junge (@JungeAlexander), and Nazeefa Fatima (@NazeefaFatima)

Regional Student Groups: A look-back at 2016

Science accelerates with the exchange of thoughts and ideas. With these intentions, Regional Student Groups (RSGs) plans events dedicatedly which have been beneficial in facilitating networking amongst students from computational biology community at the local regions. Furthermore, with 30 RSGs and still many more becoming part of the SC (including latest groups i.e. RSG-California + Nevada, RSG-Northeastern, USA, and RSG-Colombia), RSG program is truly representing the overall international perspective of the Student Council.

In the year 2016, the Student Council team initiated a survey under the title “Are you a happy RSG?” to measure the degree of content among our RSGs as well as to invite suggestions for things that could be improved. The survey has been pivotal to understand the impact as well as the requirements expected by the RSGs for the teams. Great feedback and suggestions have helped to frame the plans for the initiatives for the RSGs for the upcoming years. In addition to the survey, regular meetings were a great opportunity for RSG leaders, from different countries, to acquaint with each other.

Some of the other takeaways from this year’s events, conducted by RSGs, are as follows:

Significance of virtual seminars which aid in information transfer without logistic costs. It has been interesting to observe how RSGs have organized virtual events to cut-down logistic costs.
Conducting hackathons for computer programming as well as Wikipedia editing of computational biology related topics.
Organising café-style social events that provide an opportunity to the students to socialize and network with other peers over the topics of computational biology.
Hosting web-based online competitions.
Inviting virtual participation from other RSGs during the symposium proceedings.
Organizing one-day symposium in collaboration with other RSGs of the neighboring regions.
Utilizing open source platforms such as Bigmarker, GitHub and YouTube to share content with the world.
Promoting initiatives via social media platforms.

It is great to observe how different approaches are being employed, by RSGs across the globe, to carry out the main objective of promoting research and strengthening ties between both local and international student community. This year, due to their hard-work and commitment, RSG-Argentina and RSG-UK won the spotlight RSGs of 2016. We are excited to see what new developments and events RSGs will bring in 2017!

In case you missed it, our Spring 2016 Issue published a list of fun events held by RSGs over past two years that you can find here. Interested in joining or starting RSG? please visit our website http://rsg.iscbsc.org/ for more information!

Written by Sayane Shome (@sayane_shome)

4th European Student Council Symposium 2016

The 4th European Student Council Symposium took place on 3rd Sept 2016 in The Hague, Netherlands. We were honoured to welcome 60 participants from 16 different countries. The symposium highlighted 3 keynotes, 12 student talks and 36 student poster presentations covering diverse topics within bioinformatics and systems biology.

Inspiring keynotes were given by Kris Laukens, Roeland Merks and Núria Lopez-Bigas. Dr. Laukens discussed in his keynote several challenges in the field of proteomics and metabolomics analysis with mass-spectrometry techniques. The unambiguous identification of molecules in the resulting MS spectra is an ongoing research field within computational biology. With the keynote of Prof. Merks, we got the opportunity to hear about the latest developments of genome scale modeling of the whole microbiome and its challenges of modelling interactions of several bacterial species. Dr. Lopez-Bigas concluded the day with a career keynote. She discussed the different topics she has worked on throughout her career and the choices she has made. After a very successful symposium we continued networking and discussing the day’s talks in a relaxed atmosphere during the evening social event in the center of The Hague.

We were able to grant three students, Jonas Ibn-Salem, Lisanna Paladin and Francesco Russo, travel fellowship to attend and present at the symposium with the support of our generous sponsors: The Hyve, Elsevier and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. Further we were able to grant first and second oral presentation prize to Thies Gehrmann and Sascha Meiers, and first and second poster presentation prize to Konrad Zych and Patrick van den Berg with the support of our generous sponsors: The Hyve and Elsevier. Finally, F1000 awarded a publication certificate to the first and second oral presentation winners and the first poster presentation winner.

In addition to this one day event, the SC organised the "ice breaking event" of the ECCB 2016: The Hague @ Night Photo Tour, and the SC was present during the whole conference with its own booth, including a frequently visited job board.

We would like to thank our sponsors, keynotes, presenters, organising committee, and all the participants for contributing to this successful symposium.

Written by Annika Jacobsen (@Mariudottir), and Kevin Schwahn (from RSG Germany @GermanyRsg)

A look back at the past two years

The current executive team (ET) has been around for two years, and will be stepping down soon. Starting from January 2017, a new leadership team will be heading the ISCB Student Council. This transition period is therefore an excellent time to look back at what has changed and what we have accomplished with the Student Council over the past few years.

Looking back at the candidate statements of the current ET when they were elected in 2014, and re-elected in 2015, most of us agreed on the main issues that needed to be addressed within the Student Council. These included reinforcing our infrastructure and funding to support our ever-growing activities, improve the transparency and communication of the organisation, and promote more interactions among the different Regional Student Groups (RSG).

Here we note some of the accomplishments and activities undertaken as a team with the help of many volunteers over the two terms.

We have more RSGs!
The number of RSGs has greatly grown from 21 when the current ET started in 2014, to more than 30 at the current time, thanks to the great efforts of the RSG committee and enthusiastic volunteers in various regions. Furthermore, in several regions such as Europe and Latin America, many RSGs from different countries have started collaborating on events and fostering interactions across borders.

More than doubled the funding for RSGs
In response to the growing RSGs, the ET has successfully sought 5000 USD (previously 2000 USD) from ISCB for funding the events organized by the RSGs across the world. The increase is merited as the number of RSGs is steadily growing, along with the excellent event proposals from the groups.

Survey among RSGs for feedback and quality of life improvements
Furthermore, the RSG procedures underwent thorough review and revision based on feedback through online surveys that saw participation from RSG leaders and regular meetings with the RSG committee. Many of the changes involved improving the efficiency of backend management within the organisation. The first changes that are now visible include ready-to-use templates for funding and renewal applications. Several other changes are pending, which will be picked up by the new team.

Highlights from the Student Council Symposium 2016

On July 8 2016, computational biologists, bioinformaticians and computer scientists from around the world gathered in Orlando, Florida for a day of lectures, student presentations and networking. Only the 12th annual Student Council Symposium (SCS) could bring together such a diverse group of students from different backgrounds centered around computational biology.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

John Quackenbush opened the day with a keynote lecture packed with advice for the early-career scientists in the room. He opened with this well-known quote attributed to George Box and stressed that research isn’t about perfection. Any model will have inherent flaws (especially when dealing with network biology!), but that’s OK. Good models can help solve the problem at hand and move scientific understanding forward.

Janet Thornton followed later in the day, detailing her career path from student, to PI, to eventual director of European Bioinformatics Institute. At each step she left the audience with vignettes and advice: “You have to work hard, and it only gets harder.” Tough words to hear for a room full of students who already devote countless hours to their research, but Janet made sure to emphasize the increased workload was balanced out by an increase in excitement.

Throughout the day, students gave oral presentations about research they’re conducting, both in the lab and behind a keyboard. The topics ranged from protein structure prediction to cancer biology and drug discovery. A poster session closed out the day’s formal activities, with opportunities to ask tough questions about the presentations and understand the research a little better.

A unique feature of SCS2016 was a presentation and workshop by our sponsor Elsevier. Representatives from the company demoed the Pathway Studio program, a knowledge exploration tool designed to facilitate understanding known biology and generating new hypotheses. Our other sponsors (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Oxford University Press, F1000 and Eli Lilly) generously donated money to support travel fellowships and prizes. SCS2016 wouldn’t happen without our sponsors, so thank you!

The SCS2016 organizers would also like to thank the volunteers who were a major help in planning the symposium and students who attended and made the symposium special. See you all in Prague for SCS 2017!

Written by Ben Siranosian (@BenSiranosian) and Bart Cuypers (@cuypersb)

The ISCB Student Council's Spring 2016 Newsletter

July 2016 marks the 12th anniversary of the International Society for Computational Biology Student Council. Since its inception in July 2004, the Student Council (SC) has grown remarkably with graduate students and researchers across the globe, with over 2500 members, and the diverse events that the SC and its affiliated groups organize. Our Spring 2016 newsletter highlights some of the momentous events from the past, and features the current and future events, including symposiums and conferences of the SC.

Overview: The Student Council Symposiums 2016

Members of the ISCB Student Council are organizing three student symposiums in 2016 that provide young bioinformaticians with excellent opportunity to present their research to an international audience and build a professional network. This article provides an overview of our symposiums in 2016 taking place in the USA, Netherlands and Argentina.

Our Regional Student Groups in 2016

Regional Student Groups (RSGs) were implemented and conceptualized by the Student Council in 2006 with the aim to promote a collaborative research environment, to foster interaction and communication between young scientists working in the field of computational biology. Web links and contacts including links to social media pages along with further information on the various RSG can be found in this article. We encourage you to contact your local RSG if you would like to support them as a volunteer or know more about their events.

Looking back at the Student Council Symposium (SCS) 2015

In this article, we are looking back at a successful Student Council Symposium 2015 which took place on July 10, 2015 in Dublin, Ireland.

Welcome to the ISCB Student Council Newsletter!

Regional Science Groups

Regional Science Groups (RSGs) were implemented and conceptualized by the Student Council in 2006 with the aim to promote a collaborative environment for research, and to foster interaction and communication between various scientific groups working on research in the field of computational biology. A decade later, the Student council comprises of 26 RSGs throughout the world comprising of research fellows and graduate students conducting large scale events and focus groups actively working on building a strong platform for bringing together the scientific community in the field of Computational Biology in their respective countries. Some of the various RSGs of the student council include United Kingdom, Denmark, Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, Northern Africa, Belgium, Mexico, Netherlands, Australia , Luxembourg, India and a few others.

Web links to the contacts (including links to facebook and/or twitter along with further information on the various RSG can be found here:

ISCBSC Webinars

SCS 2020

ESCS 2020

SCS2021