On June 18th the ISMB held its inaugural Future Perspectives Day for
PhD students and PDRAs. The opening session (chaired by Snezana
Djordjevic) addressed the important issue of Open Access and the
changing landscape of research publications, and featured three
speakers with different perspectives on the subject: Nonia Pariente,
Chief Editor of Nature Microbiology; Catherine Sharp, Head of Open
Access Services, UCL Library Services; and Dalmeet Singh Chawla a
Freelance Science Journalist. The lunchtime session (chaired by Renos
Savva) on post-PhD skills in the jobs marketplace drew on expertise
from the business sector – Juliane Haupt from the Finian Group, Heidi
Kingdon Jones from IRBM and Mark Fisher from UCL Business. The
afternoon session (chaired by Adrian Shepherd) focused on the role of
AI and robotics in 21st century bioscience. Ted Meeds from Healthcare
Machine Learning at Microsoft gave a talk on the role of deep learning
in synthetic biology, Fane Mensah showed how Synthace is developing
software to facilitate the rapid design of high-throughput laboratory
experiments, and Romain Laine from the MRC Laboratory for Molecular
Cell Biology at UCL explained the ways in which machine learning is
transforming image processing in the context of advanced microscopy.
