Columns @IndiaBioscience

IndiaBioscience: Engaging communities, enabling networks

Harini Barath

The IndiaBioscience team is excited to announce the launch of a beta version of its new website at YIM2015. As we move forward and explore new directions, we are redesigning our website to reflect these changes, and intend to offer a more streamlined experience for our users. While the final website is expected to be ready two months from now, we urge you to check out the beta version while it is still in the testing phase. Born out of the Young Investigators’ Meetings, IndiaBioscience is now more than 4 years old. Even though we are based out of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, we work pan-India, building networks, engaging communities and enabling growth within the life science community. IndiaBioscience organises and participates in a variety of meetings, which encourage peer-to-peer learning and catalyse collaborations. Skill development is a new area that we will foray into later this year.

We aim to shape our website to be a one-stop place for news about Indian biology, and resources in the form of articles and videos. Our team collates and updates data about relevant grants, jobs and events. We have a database of over 700 Indian institutes, universities and colleges where biology is done. Our new website will contain an interactive platform that will let the user filter a large amount of organization-specific information (jobs, grants, news, etc) in an efficient manner. The new avatar of the website has been designed with feedback from institutions and users, with the purpose of bridging the information gap that currently exists.