RSG-Turkey aims to establish a framework for the communication and interaction of the students and post-docs working in computational biology and bioinformatics in Turkey, as well as connecting the young Turkish community to its international counterparts. Our main objective is to provide an environment to share the knowledge and experience within the young scientists from various institutions and promote collaboration among them. Moreover, RSG-Turkey plans to expand training and work opportunities of students and researchers in the earlier years of their career.
Although computational biology and bioinformatics is a relatively new research area, several groups are performing high quality research in Turkey and the number of students (undergraduates and graduates) and young investigators is substantially high. However, there is an organizational gap for students to convert this high potential into fruitful discussions, information sharing and being aware of each other’s research. There are several nation-wide conferences and workshops regularly taking place in different cities. One of our mission will be bridging the organizational gap e.g. through getting involved in these activities and announcing them. This regional student council will serve to several universities and closely collaborate with the Bioinformatics Council, a recently established national organization which we percieve as the Turkish counterpart of the ISCB. In this way, this student organization will help introducing the industrial and academic research in computational biology and bioinformatics area.
Due to the limited range of applications in industry, computational biology and bioinformatics is not a very well-known area among students in Turkey. Encouraging the undergraduates to become more familiar with this field will be another goal for our community. In this means, we are going to arrange short talk series given by local and foreign researchers working in this area, in order to popularize the topic. Additionally, we are going to set up information desks in student centers of the universities to advertise computational biology and bioinformatics.
