Support from BMI for attendance at conferences
Conferences are an integral part of your future professional career. They represent your opportunity to showcase your work and to connect with colleagues of similar interests. As such, the Biomedical Informatics Program supports student travel to conferences. Each student should review the conferences in the field and plan on attending one conference per year. Examples of conferences in Biomedical Informatics include ISMB, AMIA, PSB, Medinfo. These conferences are especially vital for students to attend during the first two years of their studies when students may not have gotten deeply involved in their research but must obtain an overview of the current activities in the field. Senior students may wish to consider more specialized conferences in their area of research.
Please note, while the BMI exec prefers to support students with conference submissions (abstracts, posters, presentations, conference preceedings), this should not deter you from publishing in peer-reviewed journals which are higher impact. Simply include a justification that all your publishable work has been submitted to higher-impact venues leaving you with very little for conference publication.
Students supported by the NLM-grant must attend the annual NLM conference usually held in June or July. This conference does not count towards the "one conference per student, per year" limit.
The actual amount of travel funds varies from year to year. For planning purposes, assume there is approximately $1000 (or less) per student for travel per year. This amount is not allocated automatically. Please follow the procedure to obtain permission to travel carefully. Failure to obtain permission to travel could lead to requests for reimbursement from an already depleted travel budget (aka, you will not be reimbursed).
Often the conference registration may be charged directly to a research grant. If so, the registration fee will not be included as part of your BMI travel allocation.
