BioExcel Summer School Live Again!

Over the last three years, the BioExcel Centre of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research ( bioexcel.eu ) has been actively involved in supporting the biomolecular simulation research community. In particular, the BioExcel Summer School is our flagship annual event and is one of the most popular training events organised by the centre.

After having to hold four of the recent BioExcel schools, including the 2020 and 2021 summer schools, remotely due to the COVID pandemic, we were really glad to be able to once more run the summer school with onsite meetings in June this year. The organisers, trainers and attendees were very excited to meet each other face-to-face. It was great to be able to see the audience in person while presenting and to have a coffee break while discussing questions. The school covered a broad range of topics, such as molecular dynamics simulations, biomolecular docking, free energy calculations, advanced sampling methods, workflow solutions with BioExcel Building Blocks (BioBB), and quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics ( bioexcel.eu/events/bioexcel-summer-school-on-biomolecular-simulations-2022 ). The summer schools are targeted particularly at early-stage researchers. As with other BioExcel training events, several travel bursaries were offered to assist young researchers to attend this school. You can read about how inspiring and valuable this year’s travel grant winners found their experiences at the course ( bioexcel.eu/hear-from-our-2022-bioexcel-summer-school-travel-grant-beneficiaries ). There were also prizes for posters as part of the school and, as is traditional, the winners were given the opportunity to present their work in the BioExcel Student webinars: bioexcel.eu/student-webinar-summer-school-2022-edition-2022-09-15 . 

In addition to the annual schools, BioExcel runs a lot of other initiatives to support the biomolecular simulation community, and PDC has been a leader in many of them. 

The BioExcel webinars feature notable developments in the field of computational biomolecular research, and interested researchers are invited to find out about the latest tools and techniques: bioexcel.eu/category/webinar .

The BioExcel forums, ask.bioexcel.eu  and gromacs.bioexcel.eu , provide support for the community, so check out the existing questions and answers or ask a new question if you need some assistance with your research. 

BioExcel also provides online training materials: you can browse the lectures that are available on the BioExcel YouTube channel www.youtube.com/c/BioExcelCoE  or view a range of GROMACS tutorials at tutorials.gromacs.org . 

In addition, there is a biomolecular competency hub at competency.ebi.ac.uk/framework/bioexcel/3.0  where you can browse competencies, career profiles and training resources to advance your career.