Alfred Schissler Conference Summary

Alfred Schissler Conference Summary

Alfred Schissler
Ph.D. Candidate
Statistics GIDP

Conference Summary
23rd Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), 14th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB)
Dublin, Ireland
July 10-14, 2015

My experience at the ISMB/ECCB 2015 meeting in Dublin fundamentally broadened my perspective of the field of bioinformatics and computational biology while providing excellent professional development and network opportunities. The conference included over 1500 attendees, many specialized workshops, 6 keynote addresses, over 100 thematic talks, and dozens of oral poster presentations. Each of these activities provided unique benefits to the conference goers. I will share some of my experiences for during these proceedings, highlighting just a few of the key takeaways I gathered.

Prior to the main conference, I was fortunate to attend a half-day workshop entitled How to Navigate a Bioinformatics Career. This workshop was specially created for burgeoning bioinformatic researchers and delivered by well-established professionals ranging from professors to training directors of institutes. The first session gave hands-on experience with giving an "elevator" talk. This is a skill that is easily under-estimated and, with a little coaching, can have huge positive effects in your career. As a side note, the next morning I found myself on the elevator with the first keynote speaker, Michael Levitt, delivering my newly developed elevator pitch! Dr. Levitt was very kind and also gave advice on orally presenting scientific work that greatly improved my performance during my talk (more on that later). Another useful session described how to utilize social media, such as Twitter and blogging, to increase your influence and to help select which articles/research is trending and important. I personally under-utilized these avenues and I now see the timesaving information retrieval gains associated with them. Finally, I was given instruction and resources to create individualized development plans tailored to my needs.

One of the special qualities of the ISMB/ECCB conference is the great number and quality of keynote speakers. Every morning and afternoon, a keynote address was given and each one provided a slightly different experience. The style of the keynote addresses ranged from fairly technical to more nostalgic and personal. All presenters clearly indicated the open problems and areas where computational methods are highly sought after to describe biological phenomenon. For example, Eileen Furlong, from the European Bioinformatics Institute - European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EBI-EMBL), stressed the opportunity and need for modeling of molecular players in cell and organism development. I was truly inspired by the findings and enthusiasm of the keynote presenters.

With over 100 talks given within only three days, it was impossible to attend every session that piqued my interest. Thankfully, the conference organizers introduced a new categorization of talks into themes to help facilitate selection. I focused on the "Disease" theme since my lab specializes in translational medicine (translating basic scientific results to medical applications). I found the talks to be especially stimulating and saw numerous opportunities to improve and extend our current methodological frameworks. There were more than a few instances were I was surprised to see connections to our work in single-subject analysis in many diverse applications. Another very nice feature of the conference is that the founding association, the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB), provides video capture of each talk. This really allowed me to digest the material rather than hurriedly taking notes talk after talk. Also, I flagged many papers that I will read based on the talks I witnessed.

Perhaps the most personally beneficial activity was presenting our work as one of the thematic talks. I presented in the main auditorium after weeks of fine-tuning and rehearsal. I believe that I gave a very effective talk and received much interaction with the audience. One key piece of advice helped that me came from the encounter with Dr. Levitt. He said, "actors are very good at performing to crowds, but we are very good at talking to people. Find one person that looks interested and teach them [while switching from person to person a bit]." Utilizing this strategy, I really felt that people understood and, perhaps, may try our methods. Further, I had many positive networking experiences after the talk that may result in future job opportunities and research collaborations.

Finally, I note that the ISMB/ECCB conference features mostly computer scientists and computer biologists. While this already represents a diverse interdisciplinary gathering, I was struck by the opportunity for statisticians to contribute in solving these problems. As such, I was truly grateful for the support of the Graduate Interdisciplinary program in general and for the Statistics program in particular in affording my attendance at the ISMB/ECCB 2015 conference.