ISCB Newsletter 8-2

Student Council Undertakes a Massive Action Plan

Submitted by Sevin Turcan, ISCB SC Marketing Subcommittee Member

ISCB Student Council (ISCB-SC) is dedicated to creating opportunities to facilitate the advancement of students and young researchers in the field of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. The Student Council is made up of various subcommittees, including Business Relations, Events, Marketing, Operations and Outreach, to foster its development. There is always an opportunity for enthusiastic members of the SC to actively participate in the subcommittee of their choice and join the leadership to further the efforts of the SC. The SC also organizes events to unite students and trainees during conferences such as ISMB and ECCB, and provides mentoring opportunities for students. ISCB student post doctoral members can enroll in the mentoring program to be paired with a senior member with an expertise in the student's area of research.

According to a recent SC questionnaire conducted internally, members have mentioned that they benefited greatly from attending conferences, student exchange programs, networking during conferences and participating in the Student Council! If you are a student or post doc (trainee) member of ISCB and are interested in joining the ISCB Student Council, please www.iscbsc.org/ and be sure to mark the Student Council checkbox within your electronic membership registration/record.

Kudos to Victor Weigman of the ISCB SC Business Relations subcommittee! Victor proposed the 'Massive Action Plan' for this subcommittee in preparation for ISMB. The plan consists of two parts; Project Pairing Program (PPP) and Industrial Training Source. The current emphasis is on developing the PPP, where graduate students are to be paired up with participating companies. Such an agreement would benefit both parties by providing extramural support to companies, along with experience and funding to graduate students. The main goal heading into ISMB 2005 is to create a working database of people who have participated in academic and industry relations. ISCB Vice President Barbara Bryant suggests creating a list where the details of the arrangement between the companies and students can be documented. Some of these details will include the financial nature of the relationship, or whether the student is just planning to present his/her work. She also suggests compiling a FAQ to go along with the PPP project as an informative measure. These suggestions and many others are being compiled into a task list for the members of this subcommittee to begin implementing. If you would like to learn more about this particular project, along with deadlines and milestones for its completion, please refer to the website created by Victor Weigman, BRC Chair, at www.unc.edu/~weigman/ISCB-SC/.