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RSG Norway is a non-profit organisation that aims to create a platform to foster interactions and networking among students, early-career researchers and professionals in computational biology and related fields. Their approach is to organize events around training, career advice, and industry involvement as well as simple get-togethers with various activities, such as board games. Most recently they organised a panel talk on careers in bioinformatics with invited speakers Odd-Arne Olsen (NMBU), Oleg Agafonov (DNV), Annbjørg Barbakken (OUS), Federico Bianchini (UiO) and Marieke Kuijjer (NCMM).
In the core group at the RSG Norway we find many familiar names from NCMM. Roza Berhanu Lemma is the co-founder of the group and Ieva Rauluseviciute is the current president with Vipin Kumar as the vice president. Ping-Han Hsieh currently functions as the group's secretary while Katalin Terézia Ferenc, Tatiana Belova and Romana Tabita Pop are core members. Marieke Kuijjer is the group's faculty advisor. In addition to people from NCMM, Nazeefa Fatima from Center for Bioinformatics UiO, is the founder of RSG-Norway and project leader at NCB, Jaime Castro Mondragon from Nykode and Chinh Nguyen from University of Bergen are other core members of the group.
Key take-aways from the panel talk
Annbjørg Barbakken, a researcher at the Bioinformatics Core Facility at the Institute for Cancer Research (OUS) and Federico Bianchini, a head engineer at the Centre for Bioinformatics, both agreed that the career paths they have taken were a little random, which actually happens a lot within relatively new disciplines such as bioinformatics. Annbjørg is a relatively recent Master studies graduate and she noted that working in the Core facility allows her to stay close to research and contribute to new discoveries without technically being in the academia herself, and having her career dependent on research success.
Other panelists have extensive experience in the academia. Professor Odd-Arne Olsen from NMBU shared his experience of going from academia to the private sector for a while and then back to the academia. Whereas after abound 10 years in the academia, life scientist Oleg Agafonov was driven by curiosity to explore the private sector and now works as a researcher at DNV’s R&D team. Odd-Arne and Oleg both shared their views about working in the industry, and highlighted that depending on the company, industrial research might not be so different from academic research, only driven by different forces.
As a general message of the evening, Katalin had the impression that walking in and out of academia, gaining experience in different topics and maybe even in different fields, is not the exception but rather the norm. And that the idea of selecting a topic to spend the rest of your life with, which is often the standard view of a successful academic scientific career, might be quite stressful.
– Much of the efforts needed to seek out opportunities as computational biologists seem to be still principally determined by individual circumstances. While this offers a variety of possible career paths, it also implies that our field is yet to fully mature institutionally, she said.
– While efforts are currently undertaken by both academia and the private sector to consolidate the contours of how our field should operate, we as a community of professionals in bioinformatics still hold the initiative as to how we wish to see this field evolve, she commented.
Top tips for computational biology students
Marieke Kuijjer, one of the panelists, emphasised that students and early career researchers should not underestimate their skills and should try to find a project that they are excited about and that makes them happy. She advised applying to as many positions as possible as one might not know which position fits best.
Professor Odd-Arne Olsen noted that nobody has a pure bioinformatics career and challenges in career paths are similar for different fields. He also advised to seek the best people working on the topic you are interested in that could further your career. Oleg Agafonov advised not to be afraid of applying to industry positions, he mentioned that it is not as bad as one may assume and is basically similar to doing research in an academic environment.
Annbjørg Barbakken pointed out that what seems an obvious choice might not be the obvious career path, therefore don’t be afraid to try different things. Federrico Bianchini advised not to focus too much on a single topic, focusing on more topics and skills gives a wider perspective and opportunities. He also advised to focus on more methodologies and technologies.
How RSG Norway was born
Co-founder Roza explains how RSG Norway first came about and how she got involved. She was attending the ISCB-ECCB conference in Basel in 2019, where a former colleague in the Mathelier lab, Aziz Khan, introduced her to Nazeefa. At the time Nazeefa was based in Sweden and was interested in expanding Nordic RSGs from Denmark and Sweden to Norway.
After several discussions with Nazeefa and another then colleague Jaime Castro-Mondragon, the group started reaching out to people both in the bioinformatics/computational biology and biostatistics communities in Oslo. They reached out to potential PIs at UiO to see who would be willing to be the group's faculty advisor and Marieke Kuijjer enthusiastically agreed to take oaths role. The group wrote its first proposal to ISCBSC for establishment and recognition of RSG-Norway as an ISCB affiliated organization in Norway and were granted this recognition in 2020.
Roza describes her role as mainly disseminating information about RSG-Norway to various environments in Norway, overseeing the activities and contributing with ideas. She adds:
– Since we have an amazing group of people in the team that are enthusiastic and self-driven, I would say that my role is limited to some small tasks.
In terms of collaboration with various organizations on national and regional events, Roza was involved with Nazeefa in organizing the first Norwegian bioinformatics days conference (NBD2022). At the moment, she and Tatiana are both involved in organizing the first Oslo Bioinformatics workshop week, OBiWoW2022 to be held on Dec. 7-13, 2022.
Strengthening the computational biology community
Ieva joined RSG-Norway in its early stages, when the group had just written the proposal to initiate such a committee in Norway. Her role is to keep track of the tasks and different events and schedule things. She sees a lot of potential in the group:
– I think this kind of group can be very useful to initiate and nurture collaborations between students and researchers all over Norway.
Katalin is passionate about sharing knowledge between computational biologist professionals, with special focus on software applications, methods and general quality, so joining the group last year was a good match.
– I enjoy taking part in brainstormings about next semester’s activities and I help out with event organization related tasks. Tatiana and myself are the responsible people for the RSG game nights that take place every month and serve as a platform to get to know each other, she explains.
Tatiana was happy to join the initiative as it gives her the opportunity to meet new people working in the computational biology field, learn from them and share experience. She also enjoys organizing events.
– I hope more students, PhD students, researchers or anyone who is interested will join us and we can create a friendly environment where we can share thoughts about our projects, exchange ideas and establish new collaborations, and just have fun playing games at RSG game night events.
Vipin joined RSG upon its foundation and describes his current role somewhat humbly:
– I hold a mostly honorific vice-president title. My duties revolve around not getting in the way of other people’s important work and helping to the best of my ability any ongoing initiative.
– The main motivation driving me to keep supporting RSG is the potential it holds to strengthen the sense of community among fellow computational biologist practitioners. Norway has a diverse and reasonably large number of such professionals and I firmly believe initiatives like RSG could help in making this field flourish even more! he concludes.
About RSG Norway
RSG-Norway (Regional Student Group in Norway) is a non-profit organization and Norway's official ISCB regional student group, approved by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and its student council (ISBCSC)). It is also a part of Nordic Computational Biology (NCB), which is a platform composed of the Nordic RSGs.
The group is involved with several regional and national level computational biology and bioinformatics training, workshops and conferences through collaborations with departments, centers and research schools such as Center for Bioinformatics at UiO and the national school in bioinformatics and biostatistics in Norway (NORBIS). The objective is to establish potential collaborations between students, trainees, early-career researchers, and PIs across universities and industrial organizations in Norway.
Everyone who is interested in computational biology regardless of academic level and background can join the group's Slack channel, or follow them on Twitter. Students and researchers are very welcomed to join the environment, suggest initiatives or organize events, such as the recent panel discussion on careers in bioinformatics.