A small but intrepid team of Seqerans recently attended the ISMB 2024 conference in Montreal, a great mix of computational biology and bioinformatics with a largely academic / research-focused audience. Join Geraldine Van der Auwera, Rob Syme and Florian Wuennemann for a lively discussion about the scientific themes of the conference, their experience running a booth, meeting with the ISMB and BOSC community, and resources for job seekers.

Podcast overview

Scientific themes / Favorite talks and takeaways

• AI is everywhere! And actually starting to produce useful results, bubble notwithstanding.
• Pangenomes are cool.
• Multimodal data (graphs, spatial, etc) is cool too!
• Francesco Lescai’s talk in the BioInfo-Core track was awesome (slight bias from the Nextflowers here)

Running the Nextflow/Seqera booth

• We got tons of visitors to the booth! Interesting bimodal distribution of current Nextflow users + newcomers interested in moving to Nextflow.
• Interesting questions about what is Seqera, what does the platform do, how does the business work given its OSS foundation.
• We ran a raffle that required visitors to run a Nextflow pipeline for a chance to win a pair of AirPods. (A PhD student won the AirPods, which made us very happy.)

Sponsoring the BOSC track/COSI

• We were the Platinum sponsor for BOSC (Bioinformatics Open Source Conference) which used to be a separate event and is now co-organized as a COSI track of ISMB. The sponsorship mostly funds travel for people who otherwise couldn’t attend the conference.
• We made special limited edition Nextflow-BOSC socks!
• BOSC is awesome and you should join them next year at ISMB 2025 in Liverpool.

Jobs!

• We met a lot of early-career job seekers at the ISMB career fair and shared some advice & recommendations: get engaged in nf-core to develop and demonstrate your skills, and check out the jobs channels in the nf-core and nextflow slack workspaces.
• Bioinformatics job postings increasingly cite Nextflow experience as a desired or even required skill. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn for a weekly roundup of Nextflow-related job postings
• Our Community team will be looking for a new EU-based developer advocate in the near future; reach out to Geraldine on LinkedIn if you’re interested.

Upcoming events mentioned in the podcast

• Sep 16-20 : GA4GH Plenary Meeting (Melbourne, Australia)
• Oct 28 — Nov 1: Nextflow Summit (Barcelona, Spain + online) (+ nf-core hackathon and newcomer training)
• Nov 5-9: ASHG (Denver, CO, USA)