I had an excellent opportunity to present my mycobacteriophage kmer usage research at the ISCB Student Council Symposium earlier today. I was one of 12 students from around the world who gave oral oral presentations, which spanned all walks of computational biology and bioinformatics. I thought the symposium was a huge success! Some highlights:

• Great keynote speakers
  Dr. David Bartel (Whitehead/MIT/HHMI) gave a talk on developments in microRNA research and some really creative tech for sequencing poly(A)-tails. The technique uses a two-step imaging process on an Illumina sequencer to determine the length of the tail and the sequence of the microRNA.
  Dr. Ashlee Earl (Broad) discussed how her lab is using genomics to track pathogencity and drug resistance in TB and other bugs. She also talked about Pilon, software developed by the Broad for improving assemblies of microbial genomes.
• Scientific speed dating
  This was a novel concept – chat with a fellow scientist and try to describe your research in two minutes or less. The goal isn’t to find a relationship, but a new collaboration!
• Networking opportunities
  Abhishek Pratap from Sage Bionetworks talked about software called Synapse they’ve been developing to help computational analysis of NGS data be more open and well documented. The student council is also a fan of networking in social settings, and took us all out to a pub after the symposium was finished.

Starting tomorrow, I’m volunteering at the main ISMB conference (what a great way to go to a conference when you don’t have grant support). Stay tuned for updates on interesting research that I see over the next few days!