Travel-Fellowship

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.

The next deadline for the OBF travel fellowship is coming up soon on August 15, 2017. If you are attending any event that develops / promotes open source software or open science, and you are willing to write a blog post about the event, we welcome your application. See the travel fellowship page for more details and link to the application form.

We had a huge response to this round of the OBF travel award. After reviewing the applications, the OBF board selected four recipients. Three applicants accepted awards, and all plan to use the funds to attend this year’s BOSC, to take place July 22-23 in Prague.

Congratulations to our spring 2017 recipients:

• Sourav Singh, who will participate in the Codefest and present the Biopython Project Update 2017 talk
• Jonathan Sobel, presenting on a citizen science project named BeerDeCoded, carried out by members of the Swiss non-profit called the Hackuarium
• Jiwen Xin, presenting the BioThings Explorer project, which integrates genomic data via public APIs

We encourage everyone at BOSC to come out and support our award winners! After BOSC, watch for blog posts from each of the awardees.

First I would like to congratulate OBF that supports diversity in the community with its travel awards initiative. I was very pleased to be one of the three travel fellowship awardees. Thank you OBF! Ιt was great to attend BOSC 2016 and meet remarkable people and know their work.It was one of the most welcoming meetings I have attended and Ι liked that is was active on the social media and the conference materials and speaker presentations were available online. It made it fun and useful and we could focus less on our notebooks and more on the speakers. Τhis also attracted a lot of positive comments from the other Special Interest Groups. So “Bravo” to the organizers!On the scientific part, it was nice to see Docker making an impression on the bioinformatics community. Everyone was talking about it. It is an awesome way to package bioinformatics applications and the fact that it received so much attention got me pretty excited. I am planning to use it to package CollOS, an open source web application I presented at the conference, that tracks, annotates and barcodes biological samples to facilitate wet lab scientists to locate and identify biological samples.Last but definitely not least, I would like to congratulate Mónica Muñoz-Torres and the organizers for their reference to the recent tragic shooting incident in Orlando.Hope to see you next year in Prague!Dimitra