Become a CSMB trainee ambassador

The CSMB trainee committee is recruiting ambassadors to spread awareness about the society and its activities. We’re looking for trainees who want to positively contribute to the society and act as leaders on their campuses across Canada. By joining this program, you gain leadership experience, meet other trainees in the molecular biosciences, be the first to know about exciting CSMB initiatives and work with us to establish a community of trainees across Canada.

The role of a CSMB Ambassador

Ambassadors will represent the CSMB at their institution, act as a point of contact for information about the CSMB and promote CSMB membership and CSMB-related events. In this role, you will host CSMB information sessions at your local campus, collaborate with on-campus student groups to promote the CSMB, share information on deadlines for CSMB award applications and share information/updates related to CSMB’s annual conference and sponsored events. Through the CSMB’s social media, we encourage you to actively engage with our posts and share photos or videos from your membership drives and other promotional activities.

Program structure and goals

After being selected, ambassadors will have a mandatory virtual orientation and training session with the CSMB trainee committee as well as a virtual meeting every month to discuss ongoing projects. You will receive approved design templates to use when promoting the CSMB on your social media pages, email threads, PowerPoint slides and in other communications. Ambassadors will have a term of one-year and may choose to renew at the end of the first term.

How to apply

To be eligible, you must be a CSMB trainee member with a current paid CSMB membership enrolled at a Canadian institution. Leadership experience is an asset but is not required. To apply, please fill out the application form here: https://forms.office.com/r/MLpUaey3S2. Applications are due September 30th, 2024.

For any inquires, please contact CSMB trainee committee members Chris-Tiann Roberts (rober199@myumanitoba.ca) or Tiara Mulder (tiara.mulder@dal.ca).

Join us for the next CSMB seminar Tuesday, December 5th at 9am PT/12pm ET

Our next seminar series is coming up next Tuesday, December 5th at 9am PT/12pm ET. Our PI speaker will be Dr. Martin Schmeing from McGill whose talk is titled “Chemical and structural biology of nonribosomal peptide synthetase megaenzymes” and our trainee speaker will be Dr. Benjamin Martin, a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, whose talk is titled “Global identification of SWI/SNF targets reveals compensation by EP400”.
Please circulate in your networks. Hope to see you all there!

CSMB trainees: Sign up to give a talk in the new CSMB virtual seminar series!

The CSMB is organizing a virtual monthly seminar series to promote the research of scientists and trainees across Canada and to provide networking opportunities. We are currently looking for trainees and PIs to give research talks starting in January 2023.

Each seminar will include a 10–15-minute talk from a CSMB trainee (graduate student or post-doc, followed by 5 minutes Q & A) highlighting their research and a 25–30-minute presentation from a PI (followed by 10 minutes Q & A). The speakers should be CSMB members. Non-CSMB members will be considered, but they must become CSMB members at the time of their scheduled talk. + + +

Career Development – Creating an effective CV – November 17 11AM

Dear Trainees,

The Ryerson Career and Co-op Centre (RCCC), and the Canadian Society for Molecular Bioscience (CSMB) are pleased to announce a Career Development offering to support trainees, graduate, undergraduate students and early career professionals with their career development.

The first component of this offering is a “Creating an Effective CV” webinar on Tuesday, November 17, 2020 from 11 am to 12 noon EST. To register follow https://bit.ly/CSMBCVWebinar

If you require any accommodation support, please contact Leia Faso at leia.faso@ryerson.ca.

Matt & Krysta

CSMB Trainee Committee Co-Chairs

 

CSMB Secretary James Davie participates in an IUBMB meeting in Kuala Lumpur

IUBMB executive committee

James Davie attended a meeting of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biochemistry (IUBMB), which took place August 19-22 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  He brought his knowledge of CSMB to meetings of the IUBMB executive committee in his capacity as IUBMB General Secretary.

One of my IUBMB activities will be to link Trainee Committees that are active in the societies affiliated with IUBMB. So this is an international effort. The goal is to help establish a trainee committee to those societies that do not have one, and second see if we can form a IUBMB international trainee committee.

-James Davie

The CSMB executive and trainee committees look forward to working with the CSMB to promote the careers of trainees around the world.

Advocating for research funding – Evidence for Democracy – CSMB collaboration

The CSMB is collaborating with Evidence for Democracy – E4D to ensure that all CSMB members have tools to help them understand the importance of science-informed policy making and to connect with their elected representatives.
E4D has prepared two very useful documents on how to connect with your representative (Connecting with Reps – Toolkit), and a specific brief for the 2019 elections (2019_Federal_Election_Brief).  We invite you to read both documents, and also to view a training webinar CSMB organized with E4D in September 2018 – below.
Stay connected to CSMB for more materials to come from E4D later in the summer relating to connecting directly with candidates.

Webinar: The Antibody Crisis: Leveraging machine learning for evidence-based antibody search

BenchSciThe CSMB-SCBM trainee committee is partnering with BenchSci for a special webinar.
The “reproducibility crisis” has generated much attention in the research community over the past years. While the issue is multifaceted at its core, rogue antibodies have been identified as one of the major culprits.

To ensure scientists can find antibodies that have been proven to work repeatedly by peers, we developed an open-access resource that uses a machine learning algorithm to screen the literature and identify which and how antibodies have been cited. The resulting peer-reviewed data are searchable by protein targets or product identifier and are filterable by experimental contexts as cited in papers, including technique, tissue, cell line, to help users pinpoint antibodies that have been published under experimental conditions matching their study interest.

Wednesday May 15th 2pm EDT

A recording of this webinar is available here:

Freely accessible resource for academic scientists at https://landing.benchsci.com/academic

 

CSMB Board of Directors Call for Nominations

Two Regular Board Member positions, and Two Trainee Representative positions are open.

Nomination are due April 15, 2019.

The CSMB represents Canadian scientists and trainees working in the Molecular Biosciences, including the fields of Biochemistry, Cell Biology, Genetics, Molecular Biology, Systems biology, and Computational Biology. Board Directors will be asked to participate in advancing the mission of the CSMB. The current directors of the CSMB are listed here: https://csmb-scbm.ca/about-us/csmb-committees/directors/

 The CSMB and its activities are fully run by its board members. We therefore seek individuals who want to actively participate in the mandate of the CSMB.
Candidates must be current CSMB members. To be considered, please submit a CV and an expression of interest outlining your qualities that define you as an appropriate candidate who wants to advance the society and the situation of researchers in Canada.  Please forward your nomination package to Dr. Phil Hieter, Chair of the CSMB Nominating committee (hieter@msl.ubc.ca)