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)