8th RSG-Türkiye Student Symposium

The 8th RSG-Türkiye Student Symposium was held online on 12 and 13 September 2021, as a satellite meeting of HIBIT 2021. Yasin Kaya, then president of RSG-Türkiye, chaired it and gave the opening talk.

Four keynotes spread across the two days. Dr. Öznur Taştan of Sabancı University spoke on machine learning for molecules and diseases. Dr. Ming Tang of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute made the case for reproducible research in genomic data science. Prof. Jim Hughes of Oxford University opened the second day on understanding the dark matter of the human genome, and Dr. Ilaria Piazza closed the talks with proteomics technologies for studying how proteins and small molecules interact. Four students selected by the HIBIT scientific committee presented their work between them.

The workshops were built as one continuous thread rather than separate sessions. Yiğit Koray Babal introduced Linux and the reasoning behind it; Eda Şamiloğlu and Sevilay Güleşen walked through the file system and data manipulation from the command line; and the theory then landed in two hands-on sessions, an introduction to genome assembly and an introduction to RNA-seq analysis, the latter given by E. Ravza Gür. A networking session ran between them, and the symposium closed with a career fair that brought students together with people from academia and industry.

The symposium reached 359 attendees over the two days. Poster prizes were presented by Dr. Özlen Konu on behalf of the HIBIT scientific committee, and the organising team thanked Dr. Özlen Konu, Dr. Can Alkan and Dr. Ercüment Çiçek of Bilkent University, who organised the main conference.