Hello and welcome back to the molpigs newsletter!

It was lovely to see so many of you today at DNA26. Hope y’all have fun over the next few days of DNA26! Let’s keep the party going — if you have any exciting results, news, or anything else to share please don’t hesitate to let us know! Whether you want to give a talk, present a poster or journal club, or even just host a discussion on a topic, we’d love to have you on board :)

1. New Committee!
2. Build-a-cell: CRN modeling tutorials
3. New molpigs timezone utility
4. Interested in presenting a talk, virtual poster, journal club, etc for molpigs?

1. New Committee

Hello and welcome form your new committee! We are

• Anastasia Ershova (events)

  Hello everyone! I’m Anastasia, a third year PhD student in William Shih’s lab at Harvard. As vice president for events, I’m really excited to provide an avenue for informal discussion and collaboration across our whole community and all timezones. Feel free to reach out with any events you’d like to see show up on the molpigs calendar!

• Boya Wang (secretary)

  Hello! I’m Boya, currently a postdoc in David Soloveichik’s group at UT-Austin. As secretary, I’m in charge of sending newsletters about molpigs’ announcements, events, research highlights, etc. If you are interested in making your research more available to our community, please reach out to us!

• Georgeos Hardo (treasurer)

  Hello! My name is Georgeos. I’m a PhD student in systems biology in Somenath Bakshi’s lab at the University of Cambridge. As treasurer I’m responsible for keeping the society afloat and finding funding sources for our (hopefully) very fun activities!

• Hannah Earley (president)

  Hi, I’m Hannah, I’m a fourth year PhD student under Gos Micklem, and president of molpigs. I’m hoping to make molpigs a friendly place for everyone to share their ideas and to learn from each other. As president, I’m in charge of the direction and organisation of molpigs, so if you have any big plans that you think would make molpigs even better I’d love to hear them :)

We’re all looking forward to helping bring our community together! If you have any questions or want to reach out, please feel free to contact any of us :)

2. Build-a-cell: CRN modeling tutorials

The Build-a-cell workshop series is an introduction to chemical reaction network (CRN) modeling for synthetic and systems biology using a suite of python software tools that make model building, exploration, and simulation easy and accessible. The software tools introduced in this series allow for sophisticated models to be easily built, simulated & parameterized, and combined together into systems level. These tools require only the most rudimentary scripting experience in python and no modeling or mathematical background will be assumed.

Each workshop will consist of a 45 minute lecture followed by a 45 minutes hands on tutorial in small breakout groups. The workshops will be on Thursday 8.30AM-10AM US Pacific time. (Please double check time zones! You can use our tool here)

Note that the attendance of this workshop will be capped at 30 people, so please must RSVP as soon as possible if you are interested. If you are interested in the topics but cannot attend, please register as well in case the workshop will be run again.

3. New molpigs timezone utility

We’ve developed a timezone utility that you might like to use, for attending molpigs events, DNA26 talks, or for anything else! Check it out here. You can also copy the URL once you’ve set a time and date to share with others.

4. Interested in presenting a talk, virtual poster, journal club, etc for molpigs?

Please send us an email at contributions AT <this domain> if you have an idea for

• a talk for our seminar series,
• a poster for our poster sessions,
• a paper you’d like to present at our journal clubs,
• an announcement for our newsletter,
• or anything else!

This is not a hard commitment, so even if you’re not sure at this point please don’t hesitate to register your interest!