Now in its 4th year the ISCB Student Council Symposium has again made an impact in the Computational Biology community. Around 100 student delegates attended the event in Toronto on July 18th where ISCB President Burkhard Rost (Columbia University), Mark Gerstein (Yale University) and Timothy Hughes (University of Toronto) delivered the keynote addresses.

The students also listened to presentations by nine of their peers, who had been selected based on the outstanding quality of their submitted abstracts. The program was complemented by a panel discussion on “Career paths in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics” followed by a poster session and reception.

Conference chairs Lucia Peixoto and Amr Abuzeid and their team had raised almost $17,500 from sponsors, which allowed the Student Council to support seven outstanding students with travel fellowships worth $1,000 each. More than 40 applications for these travel fellowships had been submitted. The program committee led by Sarath Chandra Janga reviewed a total of 75 submissions for the symposium. The organizers were very pleased with the quality of the submitted abstracts, which has been increasing consistently over the last few years. Selected outstanding abstracts from the were published in a BMC Bioinformatics supplement.