Urszula Czerwinska

Student Council Symposium at Orlando #SCSOrlando2016

I started off ISMB2016 by attending the Student Council Symposium. This meeting is dedicated to students, post docs, and young researchers in the fields of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and it gave me a chance to present my work with an oral presentation and a poster.

The day started with an Ice Breaking event: Scientific speed dating. We were given a few minutes to get introduced to other person present in the room. Despite myself (and many others) being massively jet-lagged, it was quite entertaining and it gave us the impression that you were continuing the day with friends, instead of strangers.

First keynote speaker: John Quackenbush, professor of Computational Biology and Biology and Bioinformatics, talked to us about some of his main research lines these days entitled Networks from gentoype to phenotype. The main highlight of his talk was his network-based analysis coupled with transcriptomic and mutation data. He introduced an approach where he constructed networks specific to patients and then he compared their structure described in “Estimating sample-specific regulatory networks”. He then criticized some of classical approaches calling them a ‘bio-poetry’. He also gave us quick overview of his approach to SNPs and eQTLs. He then went on to describe how important interdisciplinarity when working in computational biology is, using the example of implementing matrix formulation from quantum physics to describe network transitions.

There were 15 students presenting for 15minutes each. This years most represented topics were protein structure reconstruction and sequence analysis. Some students shared their reflection on being in between two disciplines: biology & computer science. I personally found all talks very well prepared, most of speakers were clear and interesting. The participants came from different countries all around the world and some, like me, made it thanks to the ISCB travel fellowship.

The second keynote talk was given by Janet Thornton. She is Director Emeritus of EMBL-EBI and Senior Scientist, with scientific interest in protein structure. She not only shared with us an overview of her career path and research, but also personal reflections on different steps of her life: student, post-doc, PI. She left us with lots of very useful tips. She is a very warm and humble person and is a great example for many researchers. She expressed her belief that computational biology is an expanding field and that this will create job opportunities for young researchers. She was very passionate and happy about her unexpected career path she made from physics to computational biology.

Elsevier, the sponsor of SCS, prepared also for us a special demo of their new product Pathway Studio and offered us a free trial! They were very patient guiding us through their step-by-step tutorial and answering numerous questions.

The Symposium ended with a poster session which was accompanied with some snacks.

Participants then voted for the best poster and talk. The winners are to announced on Monday during ISCB Town Hall (!!!)

We were also invited to closing social event when we could talk to our peers.

SCS was for me a great start to my trip. It was great to see other passionate students and discuss engaging research topics. Hope to cross paths with them again over the course of the main ISMB conference.

After the SCS, I still had some time to explore the Swan & Dolphin hotel area. ;)

Disclaimer: Any views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily those of PLOS.