First three OBF travel fellowships awarded

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Nomi Harris

The first round of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program has granted funds to three open source bioinformatics software developers to help them attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2016 in Orlando, Florida, this July. The travel fellowship program (announced 1 May 2016) aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. Applications for the first round in 2016 were due on April 15, with two more due dates this year on August 15 and December 15.

Out of more than a dozen applicants from four different continents, the OBF Board chose the following three recipients:

• Dimitra Sarantopoulou of the University of Pennsylvania is an open source bioinformatics developer who focuses on web applications for proteomic analysis.
• Michael R. Crusoe (@biocrusoe) is the Co-founder & Community Engineer for the Common Workflow Language (CWL), and previously was the lead developer of khmer.
• Anurag Priyam is a self-taught bioinformaticst who has created several successful open source tools, including  SequenceServer and oswitch, a Docker-based virtual environment switcher.

The OBF Board congratulates the three winners!

This first round has also shown several points of improvement, both for the program description and the application form. We are in the process of making small adjustments to both, and expect to reopen the application form for the next round of funding at the latest by the time BOSC 2016 rolls around (July 8). We encourage others for whom travel costs are a barrier to participating in open source bioinformatics events to apply for this next round (due date is August 15, 2016).

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