A lot has happened in the past few weeks, as everyone at EMBL has been adapting to working from home. It’s been a busy time for the Bio-IT community: as computational researchers and support staff, most of our community members are able to continue working on most of their normal tasks/research, the only major change being that they do that from home. Many such members are facing additional challenges, though, from struggling with reduced Internet connection speeds to balancing their work tasks with the need to care for children and other family members.

Restrictions are increasingly being rolled out with a view to slowing the spread of the novel Coronavirus. So far, the EMBL sites in Rome and Barcelona have been closed and our colleagues at those stations are having to find ways to work from home (where possible). Similarly, members at all other stations have been asked to work from home whenever they can, and in-person events both large and small are being cancelled to reduce the risk of viral transmission.

On 4 July 2019, we hosted the very first Bio-IT hackathon. We invited our community members from various research groups/departments a few months ahead of the event and asked them to think of projects that they could pitch for this hackathon. In order to provide a selection of topics, we encouraged project ideas ranging from developing technical tools to writing documents. We were successful at drawing 16 contributors from different research and non-research groups to participate in this event.