Travel-Fellowship

This is a guest blog post from Tendai Mutangadura, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the GCCBOSC 2018 meeting in Portland, June 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. This was one of three awards from our April 2018 travel fellowships call. Our August call recently closed, the current call closes 15 December 2018, you might want to apply?

How should I start describing the fruitful experience in this amazing city… First time ever in Portland, second time attending BOSC… I knew I was signing up for a great time but did not know much about the uncanny beauty of this picturesque city.

First of all, I would like to thank the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) for providing partial funding to support my travel expenses (though an OBF Travel Fellowship award). I would also like to thank my PhD supervisors Andrew Lonie and Richard O. Sinnott for the remaining expenditure.

We had another great round of applications for the OBF Travel Fellowship this spring. After reviewing the applications, the OBF Board selected three recipients, who have all accepted the award.

Congratulations to our spring 2018 recipients:

• Anisha Keshavan –  attended the eLife Innovation Sprint. Anisha is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, where she develops open source code, including citizen scientist platforms for image quality classification and image segmentation ( update - see blog post).
• Farah Zaib Khan – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Farah is a Common Workflow Language contributor based at the University of Melbourne. She has recently been working on a project to record the provenance of CWL workflows, and first attended BOSC in 2017 ( update - see blog post).
• Tendai Mutangadura – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Tendai is a first-time BOSC attendee who works at the University of Missouri and focuses on studying disease-causing mutations in canine genomics ( update - see blog post).

Watch this space for blog posts from each of the awardees ( update - links added above).

Arun Decano is a PhD research fellow in the Infection Genomics Group at Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland. Her research, with advisor Dr. Tim Downing, focuses on the phylogenomic study of a multidrug-resistant bacterial population and aims to develop novel infection control strategies using whole genome sequence data.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation awarded Ms. Decano a travel fellowship to help defray the cost of attending the European Galaxy Administrator Workshop ( https://www.elixir-europe.org/events/european-galaxy-administrator-workshop) in January 2018.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program was launched in 2016 to help increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. There are four application deadlines per year; the next will be December 15, 2017. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics even and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships. More information, including a link to the application form, can be found at https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/blob/master/Travel_fellowships.md.