Sydney Precision Data Science Centre has a dynamic Early Career Researcher (ECR) community with initiatives driven by the members and guided by our ECR committee. Each year the community hosts and promotes networking, mentoring and educational activities to support and engage ECRs in growing and developing their research careers.
Initiatives include:
Hackathons
We regularly run hackathons as outreach and engagement activities. In 2024 we partnered with SUDATA, COMBINE and Graft AI to deliver the 2024 Bioinformatics Data Analysis Hackathon.
Mentoring
Through our close connections with SUDATA a number of our ECRS participated in the society’s mentoring program as mentors to undergraduate students.
Coding Club
The ECR community organises a fortnightly interactive Coding Club to help students and researchers interested in enhancing their coding skills. Anyone is welcome to join these drop-in sessions.
Workshops & retreats
We organise various workshops and events to support our community in developing their careers and to educate the wider community in data science. In 2024 our two-day development workshop focused on developing discipline-specific strategies for excelling as researchers amidst prevailing scientific trends, such as the use of large language models. We also contributed to two What is bioinformatics? workshops, one at USyd and the other at UNSW.
Conferences
Members of our ECR community are involved in organising COMBINE and ABACBS conferences each year.
Social gatherings
In addition to formal and educational activities our community comes together socially to welcome visitors, farewell members as they move on to new adventures, share birthdays and build relationships during more recreational activities. In 2024 we’ve been rock climbing, played badminton and often find ourselves hiking. A cross-disciplinary BBQ at the start of each semester is a regular feature on our social calendar.
