On 16-17 July 2021, the Department of Mathematics Universitas Gadjah Mada collaborated with the Indonesian Biomathematics Society (IBMS) was successfully conducted the Symposium on Biomathematics 2021 (Symomath 2021). This 8th international symposium on Biomathematics is an annual multidisciplinary forum for promoting and fostering interactions between researcher, lecturers, and students in the area of Biomathematics, Biostatistics, Healthcare, and Health Insurance. The event was originally planned to be held in 2020, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it was then postponed to 2021. Together with the event, there was a workshop on Mathematical Modelling for Covid-19 which was held on the day before the symposium.
The symposium was conducted virtually via zoom and was open by Prof. Dr. Triyono, SU. as the Dean of Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada. More than 100 people from different countries (i.e., Indonesia, US, Germany, Portugal, Italy, South Africa, etc.) joined the symposium. Among them, 7 were plenary speakers, 6 were invited speakers, and 63 people were contributed speakers. The contributed speakers were distributed in 5 parallel sessions. Among the presented talks, more than 20 were related to Covid-19 pandemic. This was expected as the pandemic is still going on and many countries are still fighting against it. In line with what was mentioned by the chairman of organizing committee, Dr. Nanang Susyanto, M.Sc., hopefully this event is not only useful for academic research but also for all of us to overcome this pandemic.
In the middle of the event, there was also a discussion session regarding IBMS. The session led by the chairman of IBMS, Dr. Nuning Nuraini, M.Si., discussed about history of IBMS, Symomath and the plan for the next symposium. The next symposium is planned to be held by Universitas Brawijaya in 2022.
