Highlights of the 3rd ISCB Africa Student Council Symposium 2019 in Ghana

Abstract

The article elaborates on the program highlights of the 3rd African Student Council Symposium 2019. The one-day symposium was held in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana, on 11 November 2019 during the 6th joint international bioinformatics conference of the ISCB and ASBCB. It consisted of three sessions that included keynote talks by Prof Christine Orengo and Dr. Amel Ghouila, and seven selected student speaker talks from different areas of bioinformatics. The students benefited from networking and learning about ongoing research work by their peers hailing from different countries of the African region. The symposium proved to be pivotal to strengthen connections in the African bioinformatics student community.

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

“…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.…”

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.…”