Hi all, as you may know the BiGCaT group in Maastricht collaborates with others in the USA NRNB consortium on WikiPathways, PathVisio, and BridgeDb. This National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB) was accepted into our 8th year of Google Summer of Code! It will be mentoring Cytoscape, WikiPathways, PathVisio, MedSavant, Virtual Cell, and other network-related projects. The GSoC funds students to work on Open Source bioinformatics tools (in fact, NRNB is just one of the bioinformatics mentoring organizations) during the summer holidays. The next week or two is the time for students to show there interest and hook up with the developers to work out a project plan they will submit and hope to get accepted (e.g. mashups to other BeNeLux bioinformatics tools with Cytoscape, PathVisio, etc!). http://nrnb.org/gsoc/ On this page is also provided a long list of project ideas, though students can come up with new ideas too: http://nrnb.org/gsoc/ideas2.html Students should keep in mind that this is a particularly active time for our developer communities, so please be patient with the uptick in GSoC-related questions and newbie introductions on these mailing lists over the next few weeks, though. Potential Students: 1. Now is your time to shine. Get on over to our program page (see link above), browse the resource links, read the FAQ, and dive into the Project Ideas tab. 2. Research a few project ideas that catch your attention. 3. Formulate specific questions and original thoughts related to the ideas (or your own idea). 4. THEN contact your potential mentors via the provided contact information associated with each idea. Serious students should have 2-3 projects well-researched and be in touch with mentors BEFORE March 10. We will work with you to make the best possible application and give you specific feedback during the application period from March 10-21. Pro-tip: do not submit your first draft on the last day. Please feel free to forward this to bachelor, master, *and* PhD students whom may be interested. With kind regards, Egon Willighagen -- E.L. Willighagen Department of Bioinformatics - BiGCaT Maastricht University (http://www.bigcat.unimaas.nl/) Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/ LinkedIn: http://se.linkedin.com/in/egonw Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/ PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers ORCID: 0000-0001-7542-0286