New blog post: Undergraduate to Best Poster Awardee: My experience at BITS2026 and BioHackathon by Francesco Maria Antonio Micocci#172
New blog post: Undergraduate to Best Poster Awardee: My experience at BITS2026 and BioHackathon by Francesco Maria Antonio Micocci#172Vehx35 wants to merge 3 commits into
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Added a new post detailing Francesco Micocci's experience at the BITS2026 conference and BioHackathon, including insights on learning, community, and winning the best poster award.
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kipkurui
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HLWiencko,
cjfields,
gedankenstuecke,
hlapp,
kipkurui,
nlharris and
peterjc
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https://github.com/OBF/OBF.github.io/blob/main/content/posts/YYYY-MM-DD-event-fellowship-blog-template.md and/or the main README should be more explicit about images, but we're looking at a maximum width/height of 1024 pixels to keep the file sizes reasonable. Could you resize them please and update the branch? Thank you |
| url: /2026/06/17/2026-06-17-francesco-micocci-bits2026/ | ||
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| **_The_** [**_Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program_**](/travel-awards) **_aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Francesco Maria Antonio Micocci,_** _**a Undergraduate Student at**_ _**University Of Turin**_, **_was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend_** _**the**_ **_[BITS2026 Conference](https://bioinformatics.it/bits2026)_** _**and**_ **_[BioHackathon2026](https://younginfolife.github.io/events/2026-biohackathon)_**. |
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You could make your name link to a webpage if you liked - a university profile or your GitHub perhaps? Up to you.
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| ## The BioHackathon | ||
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| As soon as I arrived in the city and after a rapid lunch, I found myself catapulted right in the action. After the groups were formed by the organizers and got the GitHub, as an undergraduate looking at the tasks given to us was a mix of excitement and panic. |
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| As soon as I arrived in the city and after a rapid lunch, I found myself catapulted right in the action. After the groups were formed by the organizers and got the GitHub, as an undergraduate looking at the tasks given to us was a mix of excitement and panic. | |
| As soon as I arrived in the city and after a rapid lunch, I found myself catapulted right into the action. After the groups were formed by the organizers and got the GitHub, as an undergraduate looking at the tasks given to us was a mix of excitement and panic. |
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| ## The BioHackathon | ||
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| As soon as I arrived in the city and after a rapid lunch, I found myself catapulted right in the action. After the groups were formed by the organizers and got the GitHub, as an undergraduate looking at the tasks given to us was a mix of excitement and panic. |
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Maybe "After the groups were formed by the organizers and got the GitHub" --> "After the groups were formed by the organizers and setup on GitHub"?
(I'm guessing they used the teams functionality in GitHub to give out permissions to repositories for the event)
| ## The Conference | ||
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| After the Hackathon, on the second day the conference finally started. | ||
| To be really honest, the various talk sessions were packed with advanced topics that were lightyears ahead of my actual knowledge. But while the technical details went mostly over my head, listening to the speakers gave me an idea of where the field of bioinformatics is heading. Instead of feeling discouraged, it was actually motivating. Seeing how some of the knowledge I already possess is used in real life applications gave me a boost of motivation. |
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| To be really honest, the various talk sessions were packed with advanced topics that were lightyears ahead of my actual knowledge. But while the technical details went mostly over my head, listening to the speakers gave me an idea of where the field of bioinformatics is heading. Instead of feeling discouraged, it was actually motivating. Seeing how some of the knowledge I already possess is used in real life applications gave me a boost of motivation. | |
| To be really honest, the various talk sessions were packed with advanced topics that were lightyears ahead of my actual knowledge. But while the technical details went mostly over my head, listening to the speakers gave me an idea of where the field of bioinformatics is heading. Instead of feeling discouraged, it was actually motivating. Seeing how some of the knowledge I already possess is used in real life applications gave me a boost. |
You're repeating 'motivation' so this is still clear but shorter? Up to you, this is a style judgement.
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| While I felt a bit out of place during the oral sessions, now it was time for the poster session. | ||
| That was my chance to share our work and get feedback from the community. | ||
| My initial feeling was to feel nervous, but soon people came to read our poster and had a chat about it, then all the nervousness faded away. |
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| My initial feeling was to feel nervous, but soon people came to read our poster and had a chat about it, then all the nervousness faded away. | |
| My initial feeling was nervous, but soon people came to read our poster and had a chat about it, then all the nervousness faded away. |
You're repeating 'feeling' and 'feel' in the opening, which I would avoid. There are other ways to rephrase -- or leave it as is.
peterjc
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peterjc
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I'm glad you had a good time and a welcoming atmosphere. Thank you for the write-up.
The text reads well - my suggestions are just suggestions, you can ignore them all.
I would ask you check the image sizes though. One of the downsides of moving to the Hugo platform on GitHub Pages for our website is having to think about this and manage image sizes directly - compared to a platform like WordPress which ought to handle this automatically.
| It was amazing to explain our project and to receive feedback from experienced researchers. | ||
| This fantastic experience ended then with wonderful news. We won the best poster award! | ||
| Getting this recognition completed this experience in the best possible way. I couldn’t really believe it! | ||
| For an undergraduate like me getting an award like this and seeing people actually appreciating my work felt unreal. |
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At this point when reading, I wanted to look at your poster. If you (and your supervisors/co-authors) are happy to share it online, you could add a link to it here?
eg https://zenodo.org/ or https://www.f1000.com/ or https://figshare.com/ - which I think all give a DOI link.
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This is why we normally try to review posts in a gdoc before they are made into a PR! 😅 I don't think there's much point in my doing a review until Peter's suggestions have been responded to, so I'll give this "approve after changes". |
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I will re-review once Peter's comments are addressed.
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