We are now happy to announce that the registration for the MedBioInfo conference is open!
The conference will be handled in total by MedBioInfo. NORBIS offers up to 25 PhD students and postdocs to join this conference. PhD students will be prioritized. Please click the link below for more information.
It’s time to save the date for the upcoming sommer school! This year we are collaborating with CEDAS, Center for Data Science at UiB. The summer school will be arranged in Bergen and the dates are 7-11 of August, 2023. Program and registration will be ready soon. So save the date!
Last year NORBIS developed an internship program for PhD students who are looking into jobs outside of academia. In this internship program, successful applicants got a scholarship covering three months of salary and living expenses (if needed) working within the public sector in Norway.
NORBIS member Petra Hribovšek was one of the successful candidates and she spent her three months internship at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen.
Last year NORBIS developed an internship program for PhD students who are looking into jobs outside of academia. In this internship program, successful applicants got a scholarship covering three months of salary and living expenses (if needed) working within the public sector in Norway. One of the successful applicants was Sophie Fisher-Holzhausen who spent her three months internship at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) in Oslo.
“For me personally, it was valuable to take a break from my PhD work because it allowed me to change my perspective and reevaluate my goals. Furthermore, with this internship, I expanded my professional network as well as my skill set, which was extremely helpful for me when looking for a new position after my PhD.
In summary, I am grateful for the opportunity that has been provided to me by the NORBIS public sector internship programme.”
Read more about Sophie’s experience at NIPH HERE.
NORBIS PhD student member Thea Os Andersen wrote a successful application to our International Exchange call last year and she is now back in Norway after her exchange to Brisbane, Australia.
“It’s never too late to go on exchange, to learn new things and experience a different scientific environment. I’m grateful for the support I received from NORBIS that allowed me to gain a lot of new perspectives, both related to my research and personal life, in addition to a broad network of scientists from all over the world that I hope to keep in touch with for future collaborations.”
Read more about her experiences HERE.
NORBIS is welcoming two new student board members; Hannah Rose Babel at the University of Bergen (UiB) and Ashley Ahimbisibwe at the University of Oslo (UiO).
NORBIS PhD student Sophie has won a prize sponsored by AMGEN (https://www.amgen.com/) for her poster
“A mechanistic model for endocrine profiles of female puberty maturation”
which she presented at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology (https://www.smb2021.org/acknowledgments).
Congratulations Sophie!
Friday 30th at 10:15, NORBIS PhD member Xiaokang Zhang is defending his PhD thesis entitled “Biomarker Discovery Using Statistical and Machine Learning Approaches on Gene Expression Data”.
NORBIS congratulates!
To follow his defense, see who have defended their thesis lately and who will be next, please see our Dissertation site.
The 6th NROBIS Annual Conference will due to the Covid-19 situation be different than normal years. This year we will organize the conference as a hybrid meeting over one and a half days. We plan for the meeting to be streamed online and the different partner institutions that can, arrange a local gathering for those who will/can meet in person. This depends on local restrictions.
We also want to encourage supervisors and other researchers to join our meeting, both to facilitate discussion across several levels of experience, to inspire our students, and to increase your own national network.
We have student talks, poster sessions and keynote speakers. See program HERE.
Last winter I was able to spend 6 months at the Daniel Segrè lab at Boston University thanks to financial support from NORBIS and SINTEF. I arrived on October 1st 2019, in time to enjoy the fall season with beautiful colors, nice weather and good opportunities to explore Boston.
Because I found it difficult to decide on a long-term housing option prior to my arrival I spent the first 10 days in an AirBnB that was a bit too far from the city center. Due to the extreme number of Universities in Boston housing is very expensive, and it was difficult to find something that was acceptable with respect to price and standard. After nearly being scammed twice in my effort to find an apartment on craigslist, I finally found a reasonable long-term flat through https://junehomes.com/ that I shared with 5 other. This worked surprisingly well.
Figure 1: Watching Boston Bruins beat Vancouver Canucks at TD garden.
Daniel Segrè hosts a moderately sized group (8 PhDs and 2 researchers) that works both experimental and computational aspects of microbes and microbial interactions. The quality of their work was impressive and it was very motivating to collaborate closely with these people. I learnt a lot of microbiology and ecology from the group meetings and journal clubs. Another cool aspect of working at Boston University is the proximity to other top-notch research institutions and therefore easy access a lot of relevant conferences, meetings or other research groups. To get the most out of my research stay I wanted engage in their ongoing projects and I ended up studying the fascinating phototrophic marine bacteria Prochlorococcus (preprint on BioRxiv) using an updated genome-scale metabolic model. To understand how the metabolism of Prochlorococcus is affected by nutrient limitations and diel cycles we simulated growth using COMETS. To facilitate these simulations we developed light absorption and time-dependent light availability as new features in COMETS (read about the recent COMETS release on arXiv).
My research stay ended abruptly with the arrival of covid-19, but I was satisfied with my stay. I can highly recommend a research exchange to Boston. I addition to great science, Boston also offers an active running community and reasonable access to (disappointing) skiing in winter. The public transport is average, the traffic is one of the worst in US, but the city is small enough that you can easily bike anywhere. By a refurbished race bike at https://bikesnotbombs.org/ if you want to get the most out of your stay.
Figure 2: There is also good skiing in North America, but not close to Boston.
