The 13th Student Symposium of RSG-Türkiye took place at METU on 10–11 October 2026. RSG-Türkiye is the Turkish regional student group of the ISCB Student Council, and it organised the symposium with the ODTÜ Science and Technology Society. The talks and posters took place on Saturday 10 October in the U3 Amphitheatre. On Sunday 11 October, Atakan Ekiz ran a hands-on workshop.
Melike chaired RSG-Türkiye in 2017 and 2018, and the organisers asked her to open the symposium. Her opening traced the group’s history and what it has meant for students entering computational biology in Türkiye. In the second session she gave a 30-minute talk built for a room of computational biology students. It opened with why we age at all, the weakening of natural selection over adult life and what that predicts about genes that act late, and then took the group’s three scales in turn: human populations, the host and its microbiome, and single cells.
Five students from the Ankara side of the group took part: Efe Begik, Mert Kurt, Gamze Danacı, Seyfullah Yavuz Tanka and Ece Erdem. For several of them it was their first symposium as lab members, and Seyfullah was on the organising team.
The other invited speakers were Atakan Ekiz, Tunca Doğan, Burçak Otlu and Özlen Konu, and Tunca Doğan’s talk on his group’s machine learning work has given us the topic for a coming journal club.
Congratulations to Emre Taha Çevik, Sude Karaoğlan and the whole organising team. They brought the symposium to METU, and the Saturday ran smoothly.
