Rinaldo Catta-Preta was one of the organizers of the 3rd Northern California Computational Biology Symposium 2018, held on Oct 6, 2018 at the Genentech Hall at UCSF. Students from five UC campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Merced, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco), plus Stanford University, produced a one-day symposium including student talks, a poster session, an industry discussion panel, and networking opportunities encompassing all fields related to computational biology. The event had the participation of over 100 graduate and undergraduate students, postdocs and faculty members, and was an overall success!