ISCB Newsletter 11-1

ISCB Student Council

Submitted by Nils Gehlenborg, Student Council Chair, European Bioinformatics Institute

The declared mission of the ISCB Student Council is to promote the development of the next generation of Computational Biologists through provision of scientific events, networking opportunities, soft-skills training, educational resources and career advice. In the past the majority of our energies were focused on the collective organization of our annual Student Council Symposium, where we try to provide a little bit of everything. But an increasing number of active student members and growing recognition by the leaders in the Computational Biology community have allowed us to expand our activities during the last 10 months.

Here are some highlights:

DREAM Team: A team of five students from the United States, Australia, The Netherlands and Spain is collaborating on a submission for the DREAM3 Network Reverse Engineering Challenge. A previous winner of the DREAM competition is mentoring our team. More on www.iscbsc.org/dreamteam.
Visual Reflections on Science Exhibition: Proposed by the ISMB 2008 Conference Chairs this art exhibition has been organized by Student Council leaders.
New York City Computational Biology Student Event: In collaboration with the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill-Cornell and the Computational Biology Center at MSKCC the Student Council has organized an educational event with a strong focus on networking for selected students who are attending ISMB 2008. More on www.iscbsc.org/meetings.

More recently the leadership team has initiated attempts to influence policy processes affecting science and education in our field, for instance through dedicated Student Council representatives on the ISCB Education and Public Affairs Committees.

Our continued efforts to establish local groups around the globe through our Regional Student Group initiative have also begun to pay off. The ISCB Student Council now has affiliated groups in the Africa, Denmark, India, Korea, Morocco, Singapore, The Netherlands and the United States. Further groups have shown interest in this opportunity to become affiliated with the Student Council.

Some of our Regional Student Groups consist of only a handful of students while others have close to 400 members. All of them are actively reaching out to their local communities through dedicated mailing lists and organization of educational workshops and meetings.

The Student Council itself has gained a lot of momentum from this growing network. It provides a larger audience for our activities and we are now able to connect students from all parts of the world to their benefit. At the same time local communities are strengthening their internal ties through activities organized by Regional Student Groups. More about this initiative on www.iscbsc.org/rsg.