6th European Student Council Symposium (ESCS): overcoming obstacles to enhance virtuality, connectivity, inclusivity and community engagement

Introduction

The International Society for Computational Biology Student Council (ISCB-SC) is a network composed of students and young researchers of all academic degrees, most of them working in the fields of bioinformatics, computational biology, and related fields. The ISCB-SC was launched in 2004 with the aim to educate and promote the consolidation of the next generation of computational biologists as a unified global community (Corpas 2005). In 2006, the ISCB-SC founded the Regional Students Group (RSG) program to gather its members locally with the purpose of leading scientific outreach events and promoting networking opportunities, educational resources, and career advice; while supporting political processes affecting science and education (Macintyre, Michaut, and Abeel 2013).

Along with the Student Council Symposium, Latin American Student Council Symposium (Parra et al. 2014), and Student Council Symposium Africa (Souilmi et al. 2015), the ISCB European Student Council Symposium (Francescatto et al. 2015) is one of the main flag events of the ISCB-SC, organised by the RSGs, volunteer students and early-career researchers who join the organising committee in each edition (Parisi et al. 2019). The ESCS is biennially organised with the aim to (1) gather students and young researchers together to present their work within an international format; (2) generate opportunities that can contribute to the development of their scientific career; and (3) encourage interactions among students coming from different research institutes, providing them with a platform to socialize with their peers and senior researchers (Cuypers et al. 2016).

Meeting Format

Unlike any other previous edition of the ESCS, the 6^th European Student Council Symposium (ESCS2020) was held completely virtually. It was a half-day event on Sunday, September 6, following the traditional structure of ISCB-SC previous symposia, trying to keep their spirit and structure, regardless of the changes in the format (Hassan et al. 2018). The event included two keynote speaker lectures, six student full talks, four student flash talks, a poster session and a virtual social event. This time, we also organised a round table about mental health in academia which is a topic that has been gradually gaining more and more importance in the last years among Ph.D. students and postdocs around the world (Evans et al. 2018).

Keynote Speakers

The day opened with the keynote presentation of Dr. Patrick Aloy (International Computer Room Experts Association and Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Spain). For twenty years, Dr. Aloy has worked developing and implementing new technologies and algorithms to bridge the gap between theoretical models and experiments in different disciplines. In his talk “Extending the small molecules principles to all levels of biology”, Dr. Aloy presented the “Chemical Checker”, a resource that provides processed, harmonized, and integrated bioactivity data on small molecules, possible to be applied to anticipate failures in clinical trials. Moreover, his laboratory demonstrated Chemical Checker signatures can be used to reverse and mimic biological signatures of disease models and genetic perturbations.

In the evening, the oral presentations session was ended by the second keynote, Dr. Sofia Forslund (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Germany), with her lecture entitled “Confounder-aware systems in medical approaches” in which she explained how her group applies high-dimensional multi-omics data, including metadata on disease development, nutrition, and lifestyle, to achieve a highly accurate, quantitative understanding of host-microbiome interactions, that can be translated into personalized therapies for the future. Her group worked to understand the effects of prolonged antibiotic exposure to both, population and individual levels, and the role of antibiotics from food production in resistance developed by bacteria in the human gut. These computational tools have also allowed them to link the microbiome to type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, and hypertension, and to assess the role of diet and medication in these diseases, with the goal of developing personalized medicine and nutrition platforms for complex pathologies of the host.

Student Presentations

ESCS2020 featured 344 attendees from 19 different countries. From all submissions, six abstracts were accepted for oral presentations, four as flash talks and 55 as for poster presentations. Talks were selected by four reviewers who evaluated the potential impact of the submitted work in the audience. Reviewers were instructed to consider authors' gender parity as an important selection criteria.

Round Table “Mental Health in Academia”

The ESCS2020 featured a round table focused on “Mental health in academia”. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the concept of mental health should not be merely defined by the absence of diseases, mental disorders and/or disabilities. Instead, it must be understood as an integral state of complete physical, mental and social well-being in which the performance and abilities of an individual can cope with the normal stresses of life, thus leading to personal achievements and productive contributions to the overall community.

The aim of this panel was to engage the community in an open discussion about a concern that has been gaining increasing importance for researchers at all levels in academia: from bachelor and graduate students, to early-career researchers and professors. During this section of the event, Dr. Sofia Forslund and Dr. Patrick Aloy together with members of the ISCB-SC Executive Team Sayane Shome and Nazeefa Fatima, shared ideas, valuable insights and experiences regarding three main topics: 1) “The Burnout effect” and “Work overload” impact on the mental (and physical) health of Academics; 2) Feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and depression among graduate students; and 3) Personal coping mechanisms and institutional entities that could help to address and alleviate these conditions. The audience was also able to join the discussion through the chat, having the chance to interact with the panellists.

The “Burn out effect” describes a condition in which an individual presents diminished performance, reduced interest and health deterioration due to chronic work-related exhaustion. Inside academia this is a very common issue and despite its importance only a handful of scientific papers have been reported about this topic (Nagy et al. 2019). For instance, according to a cross sectional study, the population of graduate students that have experienced at least one symptom of the “Burn out effect” has increased from 45% to 54% between 2011 and 2014 (Kusurkar et al. 2020). During the panel Dr. Patrick Aloy shared some advice with the attendees about this topic. For example, he mentioned that there must be a shift in the paradigm of academic productivity from praising “hard work” to “smart work”. Furthermore, scientific productivity and impact metrics of the papers are some of the most common indicators that evaluate the performance of academics. Many times, achieving high indicator values, in combination with a lack of knowledge on project management skills, pushes academics to suffer from the “burn out effect”. In the words of Dr. Aloy: “Some of the most productive scientists that I have known aren't the ones that work longer but the ones who administrate better their time”. According to Dr. Aloy one important problem inside academia is that many principal investigators are trained to do quality research but they are not trained to be leaders, so the vast majority don’t have project management and soft skills that could help to guide their students effectively and pass on this knowledge. Learning from an early stage how to set goals for the research project(s), along with other activities involved in academic work, which are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and reached in a Timely fashion (S.M.A.R.T) could help academics to reach a high scientific productivity while not compromising their overall health (Doran and Others 1981). Until now only a small number of graduate programs include in their programmes, courses that teach time and project management to the next generation of scientific researchers (e.g. International Max Planck Research Schools or European Molecular Biology Laboratory). Hopefully in the near future many other graduate programs will join this endeavour to prepare healthier and more productive scientific professionals.

Regarding the second topic, mental health problems such as anxiety and depression are unfortunately frequent among scientific academics. For instance, studies on this topic showed that between 43 to 46% of the graduate students from engineering, biological and physical sciences, and other related fields self-reported being depressed. Other studies showed that approximately 31.9% of the graduate students presented anxiety disorders as one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders (Nagy et al., 2019). In this matter Dr. Forslund shared some of her insights having coped with these issues during her research career. In the words of Dr. Forslund “the feeling of anxiety comes from wanting to know if the steps you are taking in your professional journey will take you to the place you have envisioned as a scientist”. The anxiety related to the academic work does not end when a paper gets published. If you want to pursue a career as a scientist (either in academia or at an enterprise), according to Dr. Forslund, you will have to find coping mechanisms to deal with the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. This is important since other activities (e.g. obtaining funding, applying for grants, getting students and collaborations as well as other project management duties) also require you to invest time and find efficient strategies to get things done within time and economic constraints, with a good work and personal life balance. Every graduate student and early career researcher must be ready to set strategies to reduce the impact of failure and control the associated feelings of sadness and in some cases depression. Some examples from the latter may include having adequate collaborations that could help you to speed things up as well as having other back-up or side projects that will allow you to shift your attention to a different topic when a given project enters a productivity valley. Another useful skill to cope with this is to learn how to multitask and learn how to maintain an “active waiting” while expecting the results of other projects (e.g. call for applications that you are participating) along with learning and deploying self-care strategies (e.g. exercise, hobbies). Additionally and not last, it is very important to take some resting time when one starts to feel exhaustion symptoms. Taking time off to take care of oneself will always for sure help to recharge energies and come back to work with a more focused and proactive mind.

Lessons Learned

Reinforcing the promotion strategy

The outreach committee's main goal was to promote the ESCS2020 symposium to the maximum possible number of students and early career researchers working in the areas of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (Hassan et al. 2018). The promotion activities make sure that the targeted audience understand this event was designed for them and includes a program to address their interests. To increase the information range, we took advantage of Social Networks (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) besides email campaigns through dedicated regional mailing lists, reaching out to the universities, known communities, and experts in the field. During the early stages of the organisation, we thoroughly planned the communications for the entire period and updated it by measuring the impact of our communications every week.

We observed that the impact of the digital strategies grew with time and caught attendees’ attention. All the contents prepared for the outreach was shared multiple times to make it easier for targeted audiences to find the content in their timelines. We experimented with our communications by incorporating appealing visual contents (logo, banner and flyers; Figure 1) and relevant hashtags which also increased the reach and made it possible to answer the queries of the community through personalized attention. Our communication strategy also included multiple deadlines reminders and tagging the presenters accounts to show the exciting research that was going to be exposed during the Symposium. Finally, we shared media content featuring the views of the previous participants and the benefits to their career or projects by interviewing them.

Figure 1. Summary flyer used in the ESCS2020 social network accounts.

Written informed consent to publish was obtained from the individuals in the flyer.

During the symposium day, live-tweeting boosted the participants’ networking and discussions online. It led our communications to be released in a regular manner, resulting in a greater reach. For example, our posts through our Twitter account resulted in more than five hundred thousand tweet impressions (the number of times the tweet has been seen) and nearly four thousand profile visits. Online platforms have become a key part for disseminating and promoting scientific events. The ISCB-SC is actively working on improving its social media presence to improve the way our events are promoted in future editions.

Award Winners

In total, six oral presentations, four flash talks and 63 poster presentations were displayed during the ESCS2020. The winners for each category were selected by voting of the attendees who submitted their vote on-line through a Google Form. The votes were registered and the winners of each category were the ones with the highest percentages of voting preference (%VP). For the category “Best Oral Presentation” Asma Yamani (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia) was awarded with her project titled: “A sequence-based approach to classify activation/inhibition relationship of protein-protein interaction (PPI) using machine learning techniques” (27.6% VP). Two awards for the category “Best Poster Presentations” were extended to Syed Muktadir Al Sium (Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, Bangladesh) who received the first place for his work: “AntiFam 6.0: Are We Close to Getting Rid of Spurious Proteins in Sequence Databases?” (20.9% VP) and Yatindrapravanan Narasimhan (from SASTRA Deemed to be University, Thanjavur, India) who was awarded the second place through his work titled: “Network pharmacology of phytocompounds in Kabasurak kudineer” (18.6% VP). Each winner received a certificate of award and an Amazon (R) Gift Card voucher as a prize according to their category. In addition, presents were also given to the keynote speakers.

Virtual Social Event

One of the main purposes of the ESCS is to bring students and early-career researchers together and promote the networking between its members. As this was not possible to be done physically, a virtual social event was organized in the Social Lodge of Airmeet, which is a virtual room designed for the interaction among the participants of the event. The participants were able to hop between tables, meet new people and have conversations.

Conclusions

The ISCB Student Council is the student organization of the International Society for Computational Biology with the mission to empower the next generation of computational biologists. Towards this mission, SC is supported by more than 27 ISCB Regional Student Groups that work around the globe to promote its principles and activities (Shome et al. 2019).

From all the years the ISCB Student Council has been organising its international Symposia, due to the COVID19 pandemic, 2020 may have been by far the year that presented the biggest challenges. We faced an unprecedented situation that developed over several months with a lot of uncertainty that difficulted organisation and decision making. 2020 changed important aspects of scientific development not only related to the methods in which scientists interact and carry on their research protocols but also in the ways in which they can promote and communicate science. This was the case for ESCS2020, which was held entirely virtually for the first time, as well as all activities of the ISCB Student Council this year like the 16th SCS that was initially planned to happen in Montreal, Canada or the 4th LA-SCS in Querataro, Mexico (Castillo-Vilcahuaman et al. 2020). Despite the initial shock received by the organising team, the experience and well predisposition from the entire ISCB-SC community allowed us, once more to take a challenging situation and turn it into a learning experience as many times before (Mishra, Parra, and Abeel 2014).

ESCS2020 counted with an enthusiastic response of participants, keynotes and the organising team who not only ended up satisfied with the symposium outcome but also recognised several advantages in this virtual format. This leads us to anticipate the feasibility of continuing complementing the ISCB-SC Symposia with virtual activities, in order to widen the range of possibilities to communicate science as an option to deal with future adversities and to incorporate attendees coming from all over the globe (“Are Hybrid Events the Future of Academic Conferences?” 2020) (“Hybrid Meeting” n.d.).

As the organising team of the ESCS2020, we know that like never before computational scientists, in particular computational biologists, have been fundamental for the development of new policies in which healthcare, respect for the environment, and sustainable production are the fundamental principles. A cohesive global community of computational biologists is imperative to accomplish these goals and we will continue working strongly to achieve them.

If you are interested in collaborating with the ISCB-SC, do not hesitate to contact the RSG of your country or work towards establishing a new one focused on the particular needs of your local computational biology and bioinformatics communities.

Data Availability

No data is associated with this article.