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.

Keywords: bioinformatics; computational biology; covid19; pandemic; student council; virtual.

Figure 1.. World map of registration to the SCS2021.

This Figure was created with the ggplot2 R package.

Figure 2.. Summary of Prof. Huber’s talk.

Figure 3.. Summary of Prof. Mulder’s talk.

Figure 4.. Summary of Prof. Bromberg’s talk.

Figure 5.. Word cloud made using the abstract text from all presented talks.

Figure 6.. Venn diagram of word clouds based on submitted abstracts in each topic.

Figure 7.. World map distribution of granted fellowships to virtually attend SCS2021.

This Figure was created with the ggplot2 R package.