European Conference on Computational Biology 2022

The Bioinfo4Women programme participated actively in the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB2022) held from 12-21st September 2022. The aim of the participation was to inspire and encourage other organisations to adopt similar programmes in their contexts. With that objective in mind, different activities were proposed:

A “Birds of a Feather” session on “Sex and Gender Biases in Technology and Artificial Intelligence” was facilitated by Gonzalo Parra. The session had 108 participants and was well received by the audience. Davide Cirillo presented the new book published by the Life Sciences department of the BSC, María José Rementeria presented “Diversity in research teams”, and Mónica Cabrera presented the highlights of the European Student Council Symposium 2022 (SCS2022).

During the poster session three different posters were presented, including the Bioinfo4Women programme, the Bioinfo4Women research line on sex and gender bias in healthcare and AI, and the Bioinfo4Women pilot mentoring programme for young scientists.  All three posters are poster on our Zenodo but you can see them in the links below:

Another significant contribution was the virtual workshop on “Sex and Gender Dimension in Biomedical Research” within the New Trends in Bioinformatics by ECCB. The workshop included a keynote talk by Sabine Oertelt-Prigione and three B4W presentations and ended with a hands-on session on bias detection by Fatemeh Baghdadi.

The Bioinfo4Women team was also invited to deliver an invited flash talk in the “Institutional talks” session, where Alba Jené showcased the activities of the Bioinfo4Women Programme. The talk caught the audience’s attention and brought the topic of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) to the scientific schedule of the conference.

Fro the programme a booth was also organised at the conference, where they interacted with delegates over the B4W overview poster and two meet-the-author sessions, inviting informal discussions with Davide Cirillo about the recently published book “Sex and Gender Biases in Technology and Artificial Intelligence“.

In addition to these activities, the conference meeting rooms were renamed with those of relevant researchers, such as Anna Tramontano, Margaret O. Dayhoff, Rosalind Franklin, and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Large panels containing the researcher’s name, an illustrated picture, a brief biography highlighting her most remarkable contributions, and a link to a relevant website were created to encourage young female researchers to pursue scientific careers.