ISCB Student Council Symposium 2021, a virtual global venue: challenges and lessons learned

Abstract

Since 2004, the ISCB Student Council has been organizing different symposia worldwide, gathering together the community of young computational biologists. Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic situation, the world scientific community was forced to cancel in-person meetings for almost two years, imposing the adoption of virtual formats instead. After the successful editions of our continental symposia in 2020 in the USA, Latin America, and Europe, we organized our flagship global event, the Student Council Symposium (SCS) 2021, trying to apply all previous lessons learned and to exploit the advantages that virtuality has to offer.

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“…The International Society of Computational Biology-Student Council (ISCB-SC) organized a virtual global meeting in 2021 using the platform Airmeet. 113 Despite the global presence of ISCB-SC, in the pre-pandemic era usually only few board members attended the conferences due to high travel costs, while the whole board attended in 2021. The organizers highlighted the importance of social media accompanying the virtual event to make it lively and connecting.…”

Adapting beyond borders: Insights from the 19th Student Council Symposium (SCS2023), the first hybrid ISCB Student Council global event

“…The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Student Council (SC) is an organization dedicated to fostering connections among students and early career researchers (ECRs) in the field of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics ( Shome et al 2016 , Anupama et al 2018 , Parisi et al 2019 , Shome et al 2019 , Eranti et al 2023 ). One of the flagship initiatives of ISCB-SC is the Student Council Symposium (SCS), which serves as an international platform for students worldwide to showcase their original work ( Cuypers et al 2016 , Wilkins et al 2016 , Hassan et al 2018 , Parisi et al 2019 , Osorio-Mogollon et al 2023 ). Together with its continental editions, the European SCS ( Olguín-Orellana et al 2021 ), Latin American SCS ( Parra et al 2014 , Monzon et al 2017 , Parisi et al 2019 , Castillo-Vilcahuaman et al 2020 ), African SCS ( Souilmi et al 2015 , Rafael et al 2017 , Akurugu et al 2020 ), and Asian SCS ( Grover et al 2023 ), their overarching mission is to nurture and empower the next generation of computational biologists by providing networking and soft skill development opportunities to their leading members and attendees, in general.…”

“…Notably, SCS2023 marked a return to an in-person format after a series of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The symposium had been forced to adopt a fully virtual format from 2020 to 2022 ( Kalia et al 2020 , Cuypers et al 2021 , Olguín-Orellana et al 2021 , Grover et al 2023 , Osorio-Mogollon et al 2023 ). This return to in-person interactions was eagerly anticipated by the community, and it symbolized a face-to-face reunion of researchers and students, heightening scientific exchange after a hiatus of several years.…”

1st ASCS: Expanding the ISCB Student Council Symposia to Asia

“…The ISCB-SC initiated the Student Council Symposia (SCSs) to facilitate such interactions and has been organizing them since then. [1][2][3][4] This Symposium initiative has also evolved into continental symposia, [5][6][7][8] starting with the European Student Council Symposium in 2010 1 and continuing with the Latin American 9 and the African 10 editions in 2014 and 2015, respectively. To complement these global and continental efforts, we aim to extend the ISCB-SC presence in the Asian region, which is long overdue.…”