1. Advertising the ISCB Regional Student Group - Turkey

During the first year of RSG-Turkey, six volunteers will lead the organizations. Billur Engin, the president of RSG-Turkey and a PhD student at Koç University, will coordinate the organization and networking in Turkey. Gokmen Zararsiz the secretary of RSG-Turkey and a grad student at Erciyes University will be responsible for the interactions between Europe and Turkey RSGs. Dr. Nurcan Tuncbag, a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Emre Guney, a PhD student at University of Pompeu Fabra, Gul Inan a PhD student at Middle East Technical University, Canan Has a PhD student at Izmir Institute of Technology will be volunteers at RSG-Turkey and will be responsible for advertising RSG-Turkey besides informing people in USA and Europe. In addition to the faculty advisor Prof Attila Gursoy (Koç University), another faculty advisor Prof Ozlem Keskin (Koç University) will also support this group by her comments and suggestions. In this way, this group will connect all Turkish undergraduate and graduate students and early career young investigators working on Computational Biology in Turkey, Europe and USA.

2. Organization of the Regional Student Symposium

The ISCB Regional Student Group - Turkey will be the first student organization in Turkey working for computational biology and bioinformatics. Therefore, our primary activity plan is to make early career investigator, graduate student and undergraduate students meet each other. We think that the best way to achieve this is to arrange a one-day satellite symposium before a national bioinformatics conference in Turkey. We are planning to invite inspiring researchers to give a key-note talk which will be limited to two keynotes. Further, students will have chance to present their research during this symposium. In addition to the talks, a panel session will be arranged which will be an open-discussion. The panelists will be selected from faculties working on computational biology to discuss about the past and the future of computational biology in Turkey. We believe that this panel session will be very useful for student to learn about the research opportunities in Turkey. Another important session will be the industry track. We are planning to invite representative of a pharmaceutical company to give a talk about their research and development department.

3. Creating Exchange Student Opportunities

We would like to be in close contact with other regional student groups and to create exchange studentship possibilities. In another aspect, we would like to establish the local student exchange opportunities between the institutions in Turkey.

4. Advertising the Computational Biology Field to the Students in Turkey
As we implied in the first section, computational biology and bioinformatics is relatively a new area for students in Turkey. Therefore, it is very important to inform and motivate prospective students on the educational opportunities of the field. For this purpose, we are planning to set up information desks in student centers of the universities to promote computational biology and bioinformatics field. To achieve this, we will have RSG-Turkey representatives in different universities and they will be responsible for opening information desks and interacting with students on campuses.

5. Announcing/organizing seminars/talks/courses related to Computational Biology We plan to announce seminars/talks/short courses held in various universities through both an email group we have started and RSG-Turkey web page. Inviting the researchers from different countries, we plan to increase the number of talks and workshops about computational biology and bioinformatics in Turkey.