Norwich, United Kingdom
27 March 2013
The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) was the host for more than fifty experts from the UK, rest of Europe and the world on Computing, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Training. The event funded by BBSRC, MRC and NERC took place on the 25-26 March 2013 at TGAC.
The Organising Committee was composed of Dr. Vicky Schneider-Gricar (TGAC, Norwich), Prof. Carole Goble (Manchester University), Prof. Teresa K. Attwood (Manchester University), Prof. Chris Ponting (University of Oxford) and Dr. Dawn Field (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Oxford). Associate Director Dr. Francis Ouellette from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto also joined as key invited expert.
“We have now reached a stage beyond the exchange of ideas, we are now ready to take concrete actions. We want to be ahead of the game by taking advantage of the new innovations and the skilled bioinformaticians, as it is crucial for the benefit of Europe as a whole.” said Prof. Carole Goble.
“I learned a lot from the workshop. It was great to be part of discussions where important questions were being challenged”, said Dr. Francis Ouellette. “I will benefit from having been here and learning from interaction with my EU colleagues. For example, thinking about measuring the impact of workshops is something that I will definitely take back to Canada”
“It was marvellous to see the positive, proactive and interactive attitude from all participants”, said Vicky Schneider-Gricar, Head of Training and Outreach at TGAC.
For two days the highly interactive workshop saw group discussions and brainstorming on sharing and exploring training experiences, collaborative ideas and best practice. The workshop was organised under two umbrellas: 1- ELIXIR-UK which aims to galvanise the training community within the UK and to connect this community to other training activities across ELIXIR-Europe. 2- GOBLET, the “Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education & Training”, which extends the networking and sharing opportunities to those involved in bioinformatics, computational biology and computing training around the globe (http://mygoblet.org).
“The potential for understanding biology and disease using new technologies is immense. Yet this will all amount to nothing if we do not train the people to exploit these exciting technologies” said Prof. Chris Ponting.
“We want to encourage the training community to disseminate science using collaborative practices and ideas and make the best out of their careers,” said Dr. Susanna Sansone from the University of Oxford. “Among many efforts, we want to create training activities for data curation and reporting standards for sharing data and data reuse.”
TGAC is a research institute focused on the development of genomics and computational biology. TGAC is based within the Norwich Research Park and receives strategic funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) and other research funders.
TGAC is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from BBSRC and received a total of £21.4M investment in 2011-12, including £16M capital funding.
TGAC offers state of the art DNA sequencing facility, unique by its operation of multiple complementary technologies for data generation. The Institute is a UK hub for innovative Bioinformatics through research, analysis and interpretation of multiple, complex data sets. It hosts one of the largest computing hardware facilities dedicated to life science research in Europe. It is also actively involve in developing novel platforms to provide access to computational tools and processing capacity for multiple academic and industrial users and promoting applications of computational Bioscience. Additionally, the Institute offers a Training programme through courses and workshops, and an Outreach programme targeting schools, teachers and the general public through dialogue and science communication activities,
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