The first-year students from the Biology and Biochemistry majors participated on 24.02.2021 in a debate on the theme "Why bioinformatics is needed?”. I had as a guest at this debate Mr. Dr. Mihai Burai-Pătrașcu, postdoctoral student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and member of the BioMentorHub Association, an association with which we recently initiated a collaboration and we want to develop it.
Our guest presented to the 87 participating students, during his career, he illustrated what the work of a researcher in the field of chemoinformatics and in that of bioinformatics means, emphasizing both the necessity and the practical applicability of research results in these fields. Students were also introduced to freely accessible bioinformatics utilities that are developed and maintained by the bioinformatics group at McGill University.
Since the debate has considerably exceeded the originally planned time frame, we believe that the topic covered was interesting for students and we propose to resume the debates with other student groups, or to schedule a workshop where interested students and young researchers can benefit from a hands-on demonstration of using the bioinformatics utilities that are accessible to them.
