RESUMO
Since 2004, the ISCB Student Council has been organizing different symposia worldwide, gathering together the community of young computational biologists. Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic situation, the world scientific community was forced to cancel in-person meetings for almost two years, imposing the adoption of virtual formats instead. After the successful editions of our continental symposia in 2020 in the USA, Latin America, and Europe, we organized our flagship global event, the Student Council Symposium (SCS) 2021, trying to apply all previous lessons learned and to exploit the advantages that virtuality has to offer.
Assuntos
COVID-19 , Biologia Computacional , Humanos , COVID-19/epidemiologia , Estudantes , Europa (Continente) , Pessoal de SaúdeRESUMO
This editorial summarises the organisation, activities, and scientific content of the 6th European Student Council Symposium (ESCS) organised by the International Society for Computational Biology Student Council (ISCB-SC). The event was held on September 6, 2020, as a satellite event preceding the ISCB's 19th European Conference in Computational Biology. Both events were first planned to be held in-person in Sitges, Spain, but moved virtually as a strategy to face the SARS-CoV2 sanitary crisis. This completely unforeseen situation has posed several challenges that have been successfully addressed thanks to the robust ISCB Student Council community structure and the strong commitment of the organisers. Despite all the obstacles and challenges, we have found that virtuality has several advantages that can continue to be kept to improve in-person meetings in the future and make conferences more inclusive allowing a larger audience to participate.