Jamboree
(1) a large gathering, as of a political party or the teams of a sporting league, often including a program of speeches and entertainment.;
(2) a large gathering of members of the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, usually nationwide or international in scope

Oxford Dictionary

This October marks twenty years since our supreme leader, Charlotte Deane, came to Oxford to start the first protein informatics group in this university.

Twenty years is a really long time, and at OPIG we like to celebrate things in style. From the beginning, it was clear that we would be doing what we know best: get together, consume lots of food and drinks, and perhaps talk about science. But, frankly, that’s what we do all the time. This simply wasn’t enough to celebrate two decades of scientific production. So Charlotte entrusted several of us with an ambitious goal: to reach out to our former members, and to ask them to join us, in Oxford, to celebrate two decades of protein informatics. And that’s what we did.

For two months, we painstakingly tracked down every person that has ever been part of our group, and attempted to gather their contact details to invite them to Oxford. Attempted to, for the most part. While LinkedIn gave us some early victories, some alumni had managed to cover their tracks very well, including one person we could only found after tracking down their three previous jobs. Nevertheless, after much digging, we managed to find updated contact details for every person that has ever passed by our lab, and nearly thirty of these former alumni (almost 50% of them!) made their way to Oxford on October 8th* to hold the first OPIG Jamboree.

Suddenly, in one room, we had OPIGlet #1, Sanne Abeln, who did her DPhil with Charlotte “at a time when there were no smartphones”, together with the latest recruit, Kate (OPIGlet #99), who joined mere days before the event. And yes, just in case you are wondering, a great deal of thought went into numbering every OPIGlet rigorously, and we may or may not have had a good deal of drama about who was OPIGlet #69. The reason wasn’t only our obsession with carefully curated data — we also wanted to make some nice mementos for the occasion.

One of the early surprises in this conference was that most of our former members wanted to give a talk about their experiences post-OPIG. Let me give some you context. Many former members, especially the most senior ones, are now high-flying academics or industry moguls, and have slide decks ready to give a talk at short notice. Many others, however, are working normal jobs where explaining your trajectory over the past decade is not commonplace or even well-regarded. And yet, many of the latter went out of their way to produce excellent accounts of their post-OPIG reminiscences. Some of my favourites were a top-notch collection of pictures of Welsh sheep to explain how the civil service processes census data, and an excellent account of how an OPIGlet’s analytical skills can be extended to areas like law enforcement.

There were far too many good talks to mention them all, so I will just mention, in passing, some of my favourites. Bernhard Knapp (now at Technikum Wien) spoke about his three tenures and the different challenges academics experience in different climates — from rigid Austria to perhaps excessively carefree Spain. Alistair Tiefenbacher, who now leads the data science team at Symptoma, provided a brilliant account of how his digital diagnosis technology helped the CoVID-19 response in the city of Vienna. And our freshly minted DPhil, Marc Moesser, gave an illuminating talk about the VC industry and how to approach jobs in the startup ecosystem. I have attended very few conferences where the average quality of the talk is so high. Maybe Charlotte is right and there actually is a point in regularly giving research talks at group meeting.

While I cannot review every talk, there were some clear trends in what people talked about. Several OPIGlets in industry are working in knowledge graphs and tools to exploit as much publicly available (but not manually curated) data as possible. Most people in academia are being pulled into “omics” and the wealth of rich datasets arising, powered by next-generation sequencing. Finally, those brave enough to be entrepreneurs or early hires at startups talked about the constant battle to get their technology ready in time, but remarked the enormous potential for impact and rapid career progression.

Interspersed between the talks there were, of course, plenty of opportunities for discussion and networking. After all, this is an OPIG event. There was no shortage of coffee or soft drinks, we offered more custard creams than I had ever seen together, and enjoyed some delicious falafel sandwiches from the catering charity Waste2Taste. Finally, at the end of the conference, we hosted a beer reception. Scientists as we are, there was obviously a discussion about how best to chill the beers, which may or may not have included using dishwasher powder to lower the melting point of ice.

No conference is complete without a conference dinner. After the talks, we gathered at Wolfson college for a delicious three-course dinner, speech included. Like good computational scientists, Alissa and myself spent a good deal of time engineering the seating plan to maximise the number of interesting conversations — and then an equal amount of time fixing it up as several people had to cancel last minute due to CoVID or other issues. But it definitely was worth it!

This one-day symposium was probably one of the most fun things I have ever organised. It may not have been the most complex (a few years ago I put together a college ball), and definitely not the most challenging (restablishing a student society after the pandemic was the epitope of frustration). No, what made it special was the opportunity to see the amazing things done by people that so recently were in my shoes, doing what I do today. Over the past decades, this group has managed to build incredible human capital: not just in skills, but also in kindness and values. For every tree is known by its own fruit, I feel truly privileged to be part of this community.

And, I can’t wait for the next OPIG Jamboree.

Thanks to all former OPIGlets for joining us at Oxford, and especially to all current OPIGlets for helping out in the organisation — whether for making coffee, rushing to Tesco to buy ice, or collecting food deliveries

* The authors make no direct comments with regards to claims that the OPIG Jamboree was supposed to occur on October 7th, but had to be rescheduled to October 8th after one of the organisers failed to read a calendar properly.