Call for OBF Travel Fellowship is Open until 1 December 2019 

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. [Read More]

Changes to the OBF Travel Fellowship application schedule

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. [Read More]

Computational biology without borders

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. [Read More]

OBF Travel Fellowship: August 2019 awards

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. [Read More]

5 tips to promote 'water cooler effects' at informal discussion sessions

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! [Read More]

Dos and Don’ts for computational training

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. [Read More]

Cordon Bleu Bioinformatics

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. [Read More]

Next OBF Travel Fellowship Application Deadline: August 15, 2019

The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. Applications are reviewed three times a year. Applicants may apply for attending any event that develops or promotes open source development and open science in the biological research community. It doesn’t have to be an OBF-related event, and it can be one that you already attended in the recent past. For example, if you attended BOSC 2019 and your travel expenses were not covered by your employer or university, you could apply for a travel fellowship to help defray those expenses (up to a maximum of $1000, in most cases). [Read More]

OBF Travel Fellowship for AfricaOSH Summit 2019

Note: This is a guest blog post from Angela Muraya, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the Africa Open Science Hardware Summit 2019. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics event and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships . [Read More]

Travel Award Recipients For April 2019

We are pleased to announce the April 2019 OBF Travel Fellowship recipients. The OBF Travel Fellowship program, established in 2016, aims to increase diverse participation at events related to open source bioinformatics. After carefully evaluating a competitive set of applications submitted from all around the globe, we were able to extend offers to five deserving applicants: Sara El-Gebali, Angela Wanjugu Muraya, Saket Choudhary, Aziz Khan and Vid Ayer. They have all accepted the award, and we are looking forward to hearing about their experiences. [Read More]