Travel-Fellowship

We are currently accepting applications for the first application round for the OBF Travel Fellowship 2020. This fellowship aims to promote the conference/event participation of attendees who advocate and present their work related to open-source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. In 2019, a total of 9 applicants received OBF travel fellowships to attend various conferences across the globe to present their work, gain new skills and promote Open Science practices in their respective areas of life science.

Two awardees were chosen during the latest round of the OBF Travel Fellowship program, which closed on December 1, 2019. The program, which started in 2018, provides some travel funding to selected applicants who, by attending events in open source / open science, will help to promote diversity in the community.

One of our awardees is Laura Acion from the Instituto de Calculo in Argentina, who will be attending CarpentryCon 2020 (June 29 - July 1 in Madison, WI) and Use R! 2020 (July 7-10 in St. Louis, MO). Because the two conferences will be held fairly near each other in time and geographical location, Laura is optimizing travel by attending both of these meetings.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) sponsors a Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting Open Source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Arunav Konwar’s participation at Global Community Biosummit (GCBS), 2019 was supported by this fellowship. Find more information here.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Global Community Biosummit (GCBS), which took place between October 11-13 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, USA.

The call for OBF travel fellowship to select the next round of awardees is officially open! Please submit your application by filling out this form. Deadline for this round is 1 December 2019.

This fellowship aims to support our community members in attending events that promote open source software development and/or open science in the biological research fields. As the organiser of Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) since 2000, OBF understands the role of such conferences and wants to support people who can benefit from showcasing their work, learn from each other and promote open science at BOSC or similar events.

The OBF Travel Fellowship program, which was started in 2016, will be making some changes to the schedule. Until now, there have been three application rounds per year, with deadlines April 15, August 15 and December 15.

For the next round, we are moving our December deadline two weeks earlier, to December 1, 2019.

Starting in 2020, we will move to two application deadlines per year, on March 1 and September 1. Applicants will be considered for events that take place in the year starting one month after the deadline–for example, for the December 1, 2019 deadline, we will consider applications for events scheduled to take place between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2020.

This is a guest blog post from Aziz Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the ISMB/ECCB and BOSC 2019 meeting in Basel, July 2019. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Find more information here.

Computational tools and software are now becoming the core of scientific discovery, and making it open source and sharing it freely with the community helps to take scientific discoveries to the next level. We live in an era where international and interdisciplinary collaborations become very central to answer big scientific questions. Given science is becoming more collaborative and data-intensive, we need intelligent and robust computational algorithms to help us to understand and interpret such big-data.

A record number of people applied for the latest round of the OBF Travel Fellowship, which closed on August 15, 2019. Out of this great set of applicants, we offered travel awards to three who epitomize the goal of the awards: to promote diversity in the world of open source bioinformatics / open science.

The awardees are Arunav Konwar, Fernanda Troyner and Nicolás Palopoli.

Arunav has contributed to open source projects including Deep Learning Indaba (an African Machine Learning community), Wikimedia, and Metafluidics. He will give a talk and lead a workshop at the Global Community Bio Summit 3.0, which aims to democratize biotechnology by building an inclusive global network of people in the life sciences.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) sponsors a Travel Fellowship program aimed at increasing diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Malvika’s participation at Bioinformatics Open Source Conference 2019 was supported by this fellowship granted to her in January 2019. Find more information here.

The phrase ‘water cooler effect’ is derived from informal gatherings and connections made around water coolers (or vending machines these days!) at the workplace or other formal situations. Such unplanned encounters lead to genuine connections between people resulting in meaningful and productive collaborations. Many research organizations value the importance of such serendipitous interactions, and actively promote them in their work-culture. Conference organizers also recognize its effectiveness and design their program with longer coffee breaks, dedicated slots for informal discussions and designated venues for breakout sessions.

Thanks to OBF support with a travel grant, I was able to attend the first European CarpentryConnect event in Manchester CCMcr19 organized by The Software Sustainability Institute.

Colourful Manchester days post Pride weekend

The Carpentries is a global community with a mission to teach essential data and foundational computational skills to researchers for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. The community includes instructors, trainers, maintainers and many more helpers and supporters on a global scale.

I attended the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference ( BOSC 2019) organized this year along with ISMB/ECCB in Basel, Switzerland from July 21st-25th. BOSC 2019 was in multiple ways a lot of ‘firsts’ for me. I was attending my first ISMB/ECCB. It also happened to be my first time in Europe. It was the first time I was putting faces and voices to a lot of names. Like in most of the conferences these days, I met a lot of Twitter-verse friends for the very first time. And above all, this was my first ever BOSC.  I was funded in part by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation’s Travel Award and ISMB/ECCB’s Travel Fellowship. My travel and the learnings I summarize here would have been impossible without both.