The ISCB Student Council Symposium-Africa (SCS-Africa) in its first edition, was organized on the marge of the ISCB/ASBCB Bioinformatics Conference 2015. The symposium aimed to gather young students and researchers from around the African continent, in the goal to share their research work and interest as well as networking at a students level. The symposium opening session started with a wonderfull lecture from our keynote speaker Manuel Corpas TGAC Norwich UK on developing next-generation computational biologist in Africa through RSGs. The symposium gathered 24 young students and researchers from 4 corners of the continent and gave 7 of them the chance to present their research. The symposium was a platform for a training session on cloud computing for computational biology given by Yassine Souilmi ISCB Student Council vice-chair for Africa. The symposium was concluded by a networking and social event supported by Oxford University Press, where the best oral presentation award (through attendees votes) was attributed to Mohamed Alibi from the Pasteur Institut of Tunis for his presentation on "Globus deployment as transfert solution for the H3Abionet Nodes”.
"I attended the SCS in tanzania and I was one of the luckiest having the chance to present my work and winning the best oral presentation award, I found it really exiting meeting other students from all over Africa, sharing their ideas and showing their work. It was also a great opportunity to explore other domain in the field of computational biology."
- Mohamed Alibi
Our Acknowledgments go to Chinmay Kumar Dwibedi and Avinash Kumar Shanmugam from the ISCB Student Council, Diane Kovats from the ISCB, Dr. Nicola Mulder and Sumir Punji from the ASBCB and the H3Abionet Project, Pr. Said Amzazi president of the University Mohamed V Morocco, Peter Tonellato from Harvard Medical School, Hassan Ghazal H3Abionet Moroccan Node Coordinator and University Mohamed First Oujda Morocco.