The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Fatemeh Mirzade, a PhD researcher at the University of Antwerp, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the BioHackathon Europe 2025 (https://biohackathon-europe.org/2025).

My BioHackathon Experience: Contributing to Open Science in Proteomics

From the 3rd to 7th of November 2025, I had an incredible opportunity that shaped my early PhD journey: participating in BioHackathon Europe 2025 as part of Project #29 on proteomics quality control. Thanks to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship, I joined a team of bioinformaticians and proteomics researchers working to solve a critical challenge in our field.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Hetvi J, a PhD student at Imperial College London, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend BioHackathon Europe 2025.

Thanks to the Event Fellowship from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), I had the opportunity to attend BioHackathon Europe 2025 located in the beautiful city of Bad Saarow, Germany. I’m currently a 3rd year PhD student in Biostatistics and my work focuses on human mitochondrial genetics. Specifically, I construct statistical models to test whether the presence or absence of somatic mitochondrial variants is associated with gene expression changes indicative of stress and aging. As part of my PhD, I work with single-cell -omics data, and run bioinformatics pipelines over high performance computing systems. My broader interests in the fields of open-source scientific computing and bioinformatics motivated me to participate in this hackathon.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Ruby Krasnow, a PhD student at the University of Maine, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the 2025 ESIIL Innovation Summit. My team (Group 4) from the 2025 ESIIL Innovation Summit.

The call for applications for round 3 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2025 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 December 2025. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)’s Event Fellowship program is aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open science in the bioinformatics and biological research communities. Awards are made three times a year; the next deadline is December 1, 2025.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Muhamad Haries Ramdhani, a PhD Student at the University of Aberdeen, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend ISMB/ECCB 2025.

The Journey to Liverpool

I had heard about ISMB before, but I wasn’t entirely clear on its joint conference format with ECCB. What I did know was that ISMB/ECCB is arguably the biggest conference for computational biology in the world. For months, my attendance felt uncertain, as I initially didn’t know if the 2025 edition would be held in the UK. When the location was confirmed as Liverpool, it was a huge relief. Being a UK-based student meant I was fortunate enough to avoid a lengthy and often stressful visa application process.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Tayyaba Alvi, a PhD student at Fritz Lipmann Institute on Aging, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend ISMB/ECCB2025.

Thanks to the Event Fellowship from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), I had the chance to attend the 33rd Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2025) in Liverpool. It’s the annual meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and the biggest conference in the field. This year, it brought together over 2,000 researchers from all over the world at ACC Liverpool, a beautiful venue right by the Albert Dock.

The call for applications for round 2 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2025 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 August 2025. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)’s Event Fellowship program is aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open science in the bioinformatics and biological research communities. Awards are made three times a year; the next deadline is August 1, 2025.

Thanks to the Event Fellowship from Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), I was privileged to attend the 2025 International Statistical Genetics Workshop (ISG). ISG is an intensive, week-long workshop held annually in Boulder, Colorado that provides hands-on training in the principles and application of over a dozen open-access bioinformatics tools for analysis of genomic data. This workshop has been running since 1987 and boasts a faculty of world-renowned experts in statistical genetics from around the globe. The curriculum switches annually between family-based and population-based genetic studies. The focus this year was on the theory, performance, and interpretation of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and their downstream analyses.

The call for applications for round 1 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2025 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 April 2025. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)’s Event Fellowship program is aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open science in the bioinformatics and biological research communities. Awards are made three times a year; the next deadline is April 1, 2025. (For those who want to apply for BOSC, note that this is earlier than the BOSC/ISMB submission deadline of April 17.)

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Keerthana Padmanabhan, a PhD researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, INDIA, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Transatlantic Behavioral Neuroscience Summer School 2024 (TBNSS 2024).

In September 2024, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Transatlantic Behavioral Neuroscience Summer School 2024 (TBNSS 2024) conducted in Mikolajki, Poland, from September 9th to 20th 2024 by the Nencki Open Lab, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS, Poland. First and foremost, this was made possible by the travel fellowship granted to me by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, for which I am extremely grateful.