The 1st ISCB Student Council Symposium was held on 28 September 2005 immediately preceding ECCB 2005 in Madrid.

We initiated the review process of student abstracts and were pleasantly surprised by the quality and quantity of abstracts submitted. We received over 60 abstracts in 7 different categories covering a wide range of topics within computational biology. From these we selected 20 for oral presentation on the symposium and another 36 for poster presentations at ECCB.

We are pleased to announce that Anna Divoli from the University of Manchester won the Best Student Presentation Award for her talk "BioQSpace: An interactive visualization tool for clustering MEDLINE abstracts" by popular vote. The award was kindly sponsored by BMC Bioinformatics. The Student Symposium was evaluated by means of a questionnaire that was handed out to the approximately 120 participants. The Student Council Leadership is extremely pleased with the outcome.