Student Council Symposium 2016 @ISMB16
The ISCB Student Council Symposium (SCS) is a yearly recurrent student sattelite meeting of the ISMB. It’s main goal is to allow young researchers to share their computational biology work in an international context and build towards a worldwide network of collaborations. The 2016 edition in Orlando, Florida hosted 15 student talks, more than 30 posters and the inspirational keynotes of John Quackenbush and Janet Thornton. SCS is a symposium from students, for students.
8 July 2016, the 12th edition of the ISCB Student Council Symposium takes place at the beautiful Swann Hotel in Orlando, Florida.
However, the story of SCS2016 actually starts in Dublin, July 2015, a full year in advance. During the SCS2015 at ISMB/ECCB2015 at the Dublin Convention Centre, the ISCB Student Council (SC), granted me the exciting opportunity to chair the 2016 edition. Just a few weeks later, I was introduced by e-mail to the co-chair Ben Siranosian with whom I was to organise the event. We had never met, and never been to Orlando. Over the next few weeks we gathered a diverse and engaged core team of SC volunteers in charge of finances and sponsoring (Ashley Conard), Outreach (Nazeefa Fatima), the website and submission system (Mehedi Hassan), travel fellowships (Mellisa Wogiren) and coördination with the SC (Anupama Jigisha).
Initially all strangers to each other, I still recall that during the first Skype meeting I had trouble writing the minutes, since I could not directly allocate each name to a voice direclty. Also, Ben kindly noted that I should not bash my keyboard so hard when writing them, since he had difficulties understanding what people were saying. Monthly Skype meetings ensured we kept on track with finding keynote speakers, making practical arrangements and anouncements, finding a budget for awards, travel fellowships and the networking event. The hardest part not being the actual tasks, but combining it with a full-time job since we were all volunteers. The biggest rush took place the last 2 months, when all the abstracts for talks and posters from the more than 40 submissions had to be reviewed and ranked. Luckily, we had help from more than 30 enthusiastic volunteers of the SC, worldwide.
And then suddenly, it was there. After resolving the subtle, but nevertheless essential problem of a missing beamer and computer in the symposium room, we kicked off with an Ice Breaking event. The concept is simple: walk around in the room and start talking with a random person. Every 3–5 minutes, on a signal, you switch. Although it might seem awkward when you participate in it for the first time, I have experienced that is actually extremely useful. By forcing you to talk, it is much easier and natural to start a conversation with that person afterwards. SCS always takes place the first day of the ISMB conference and has a relatively limited amount of attendees. Therefore, when you are mixing up with the much bigger crowd the days after, it is nice to see a familiar face once in a while and restart the conversation, for example chat about what their opinion was about SCS. Indeed, this year again, the SCS attendees formed a nice group of collegues that walked to the ISMB conference together. To aid in the conversation, Ben made sure a unique paper with an opening line was included in each programme package. My one was “How many cups of coffee do you drink a day, and do you think this is a problem?” … No further comment.
This year we were also honored by 2 great keynotes: John Quackenbush and Janet Thornton. Something I would like to share, is how both of them so quickly and enthusiastically agreed to give a presentation at SCS when we asked them, which made us feel really valued and appreciated as a computational biology student society. John even literally told me how he enjoys giving student talks and rarely turns them down, indicating a big interest in the future generation of computational biologists.
Both Janet and John gave very inspirational talks. Not only about the cutting-edge science they are doing with their groups, but also about how they got where they are now in their carreer, each in their own style. John using great quotes (including his own) and Janet with stories about when she chose to be/was director of the EBI and how this involved hard personal choices and great people managing skills. You can read more about the keynotes’ presentations on Ben’s blog.
The rest of the day consisted of 15 oral student presentations and 27 posters, allowing almost every delegate to share her/his work. The range of topics was extremely variable. Both tool/algorithms development as the biological applications of it, where extensively covered. The presentations included 3D proteins structure determination, networks subgraph mining, next generation sequencing applications and so much more. Just by reading the titles and walking around the posters made me realise how diverse the field of computation biology has become and how each scientific subbranch is bifurcating all the time. This is why this type of broad symposia and networking are so crucial for your own research. Even though you might not understand every presentation in the greatest detail when attending a symposium like this, you can get a global idea and understanding of what research lines are out there and meet people that are working on these different topics. Whenever you come across one of these topics in the future, or need the write a project with someone in that field, you will have great contact point for advice/collaboration. That is what this symposium is all about: share your work, learn about other young researchers’ work, and catalyse future collaborations.
The symposium concluded with a fantastic networking event at the stylish Cabana Bar of the hotel. Almost all attendees were present, and even delagates from previous years joined in the conversations, that continued even at the point the bar closed. The group feeling created here certainly brought us together again during the rest of the symposium, and most likely in the future.
Hope to see you all in Prague … for SCS2017! The next SCS team is already preparing while you are reading this…
Bart Cuypers
SCS2016 Chair
If you are interested in the Student Council and its activities, you are most welcome to visit our website or send us a mail.
Any views expressed in the blog post are my own and not necessarily those of PLOS
