This week we celebrated in the beautiful Playfair Hall of the The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh our 2023 Rob Kempton Lecture and Annual General Meeting.  Dr Charlotte Soneson, research associate in the Computational Biology platform at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland highlighted in her great lecture “Single-cell method benchmarking - current state and future perspectives" both the challenges and the efforts taken over the years to make benchmarking of computational methods for data analyses in computational biology more extensible and continuous.

Our own experts in Statistical Genomics & Bioinformatics presented a selection of impressive talks on their latest work including : “Statistical comparison of genetic map algorithms"  by Valeria Montano, “Embeddings, distances and phylogenies"  by Paolo Ribeca, and “Understanding the flow of Antimicrobial Resistance from livestock production to the environment and humans"  by Arianne Lowe and Lucio Marcello (read more on their work here). Our Principal Researcher in the area, Claus Mayer, closed the session with an overview of the challenges and opportunities in environmental DNA (eDNA) studies.

These public talks and a poster reception were a fantastic opportunity to showcase the impactful work that BioSS does. In addition, a selection of PhD student talks and further networking opportunities made these couple of days a great opportunity for all of us at BioSS to reunite, celebrate this year’s successes and plan ahead for the many more to come!