About us

The Frisbi seminar series is an ISTA initiative to bring together anybody with an interest in biophysics and quantitative biology. When Frisbi began in 2013, ISTA had several groups interested in various aspects of this rather broad umbrella – evolutionary genetics and genomics, bioinformatics, systems and synthetic biology, and biophysics. The goal of the series was to encourage communication and cooperation between them. The seminars were a success, and soon began to attract a diverse audience, including but not limited to biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers.

Initially, speakers were mostly PhD students, postdocs, and occasionally PIs from the various ISTA groups who work in related areas. But as the seminar series grew, external speakers began to be invited as well, and now the speaker list is a good mix of early-career scientists (PhDs and Postdocs) along with more established researchers.

The Frisbi series has taken place almost uninterrupted from October 2013. The pandemic did make things irregular for a while – we had a hiatus, and then resumed online. From the academic year 2021-22, we offer a hybrid format of in-person seating and online streaming. In terms of focus, we’ve come back full circle. Very early-career scientists, especially PhD students, are strongly encouraged to use this forum to present their work, either complete or in-progress, to colleagues. We welcome both experimentalists and theorists – in an interdisciplinary field like biophysics and quantitative biology, one needs both of these complementary approaches.

We want to keep this forum as inclusive as possible while sticking to the primary focus – quantitative methods applied to biological systems. Anybody who finds this interesting is warmly invited to join our mailing list: FriSBi@lists.ist.ac.at (this can be done from the Control Panel for internal users). All information and updates about upcoming talks (speaker name, title, abstract, and Zoom link) are sent out via mail. The current schedule can be found here.

If you would like to join us, please contact us directly or check out:
Graduate school at ISTA  ||  IST Fellowships for Postdoctoral researchers  ||  ISTernships – summer internships