Anne Lopes, co-founder of Meet-U, UPSUD - UPSaclay referent, Maître de Conférences in Biology. Her research work at the Institute of Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC) consists in deciphering the mechanisms underlying the functioning and evolution of biological systems. She chose to apprehend biological systems by focusing on the functioning and the evolution of proteins and of their interactions. Her projects aim at characterizing the 3D structure of proteins and their interactions by molecular modeling approaches integrating evolutionary information.
	Elodie Laine, co-founder of Meet-U, UPMC referent, Maître de Conférences in Biology. Her research activities at the laboratory of Computational and Quantitative Biology (LCQB) concern the evolution of proteins, the study of their motions (conformational dynamics), their interactions and their allosteric regulation/inhibition. She develops methods to predict the effect of mutations and caractherize protein-protein interactions at large scale.
	Gaëlle Lelandais, in charge of collaborative work managment, Professor in Biology at UPSUD - UPSaclay. She teaches statistics, bioinformatics and functional genomics. Her research activities are linked to functional genomics and the characterization of transcriptional regulation networks, by exploiting experimental « high-thoughput » data (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics).
	Arnaud Ferré, in charge of project managment teaching, PhD student in artificial intelligence for life sciences between the MaIAGE unit of INRA in Jouy-en-Josas and the laboratory LIMSI of CNRS. His research activities concern the extraction and automated formalisation of knowledge from scientific publications in Biology. He also has been developing skills in project managment and entrepreneurship.
	Samer Abboud, students supervision, PhD student at the Institute of Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC). He studies the evolution of metabolic networks in mushrooms with approaches involving methods from graph theory and comparative genomics.
	Juliana Bernardes, students supervision, Maître de Conférences in Engineering at UPMC. Her research activities at the laboratory of Computational and Quantitative Biology (LCQB) are linked to protein domain annotation, comparative genomics and personalized medicine. To address these issues, she develops statistical and machine learning related methods.
	Guillaume Bouvier, students supervision, Researcher in the Structural Bioinformatics Unit at Institut Pasteur. His research deals with the study of protein conformational dynamics. He uses techniques based on purely theoretical aspects or on experimental data. Due to the diversity of the data being used, his domain of research is linked to integrative structural biology.
	Chloé Dequeker, students supervision, PhD student at the laboratory of Computational and Quantitative Biology (LCQB). She works on the characterization of protein-protein interactions. She analyses data obtained by docking algorithms and by algorithms that predict interaction sites between proteins. These data are used to discriminate cellular partners from non-interactors.
	Hugues Richard, students supervision, Maître de Conférences in Engineering at UPMC. He works at the laboratory of Computational and Quantitative Biology (LCQB) and has participated in several international projects for the (re-)sequencing of genomes. He develops statistical methods for the functional analysis of high-throughput sequencing data (transcriptomics, variant annotation, metagenomics with MetaSub).
	Hugo Schweke, students supervision, PhD student at the Institute of Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC). His research work is linked to the study of protein functioning. He is more specifically interested in the interactions proteins engage between them, which he studies with molecular docking methods.

Formations Universitaires Participantes

	Univ Paris-Sud - Univ Paris-Saclay Master de Bioinformatique Parcours AMI2B, Paris-Sud Christine Froidevaux & Olivier Lespinet
	Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) Spécialité Bioinformatique et Modélisation Master Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire Stéphane Le Crom & Philippe Lopez Master d'Informatique Alessandra Carbone & Martin Weigt

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Patrick Fuchs and Pierre Poulain, Maîtres de Conférences at Université Denis Diderot, for their precious help in the managment of GitHub and their active participation to the discussion forum with the students. We also thank the French Institute of Bioinformatics, which provided access to its Cloud to the participating teams and some technical support. Finally, thanks to the 28 students who accepted to participate in this first edition of Meet-U !