Peshawar:This science-summer season, one of the most prestigious computational societies of the world: International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) revamped one of its globally-appointed regional student groups: RSG-Pakistan. The team organized an annual symposium named RSG-Pakistan Symposium 2021 to communicate the significance of Computational Biology/Bioinformatics in Pakistan.
On Sep 29, 2021 RSG-Pakistan hosted the symposium occurred at and sponsored by the CECOS University of IT and Emerging Sciences, in order to constitute a network among different national and international scientists to bring about the advent of Computational Biology/Bioinformatics in Pakistan. Precision Medicine Lab (PML), which basically, is ground zero for RSG-Pakistan development specializes in cancer-genomics and is situated at Rehman Medical Institute (RMI). It is also in collaboration with the CECOS University and provided a platform to the group for organizing the symposium.
A total of 50+ participants and professional scientists attended the event, spoke about advances in science, presented their research work and took part in poster competitions. These fields are turning out to be an important part of biological sciences. Modern computational techniques have made it feasible to conduct high quality research in a low resource setting. “We start computations in our mind to try to understand the simplest of tasks in order to solve more complex problems”, Dr. Johar Ali said.
By breaking down the problem in to its individual questions and then designing computational models by utilizing machine learning and coding languages like python is an efficient way to solve modern research problems that can minimize the practical hassle and errors during hands-on lab work. Also, RSG-Pakistan Symposium 2021 is the first large-scale computational event hosted by a student group in Peshawar that spread awareness among young scientists to pursue these disciplines.
One of the main objectives of RSG-Pakistan is to focus on the combination of wet-lab (lab work) and dry-lab (Computational work) research; to represent in a creative term the group coined: “moist-lab”. The significance of this integration is also recognized by other renowned scientists like Leonard Adleman who once said, “But biology and computer science – life and computation – are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them”.
RSG-Pakistan is a group of diverse young researchers having multiple research and professional interests under the advisory committee of seasoned scientists who encourage efficient communication among the members and the populace to inspire a whole new generation of Computational Biologists and Bioinformaticians.