BioCommons activities at COMBINE and ABACBS conferences
Bioinformaticians and computational biologists are descending on Melbourne for the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (ABACBS) Conference.
The annual conference is one of the highlights for the Australian bioinformatics and computational biology community and gives students, academics, researchers and professionals the chance to engage with the best computational research in Australia and connect with colleagues. This year the conference incorporates a series of satellite events including the COMBINE Student Symposium, Victorian Cancer Bioinformatics Symposium (VCBS), Symposium on Bioinformatics Entrepreneurship and Industry and BioC Asia.
The Australian BioCommons and ABACBS have long supported one another's efforts to promote bioinformatics and computational biology in Australia. This year the BioCommons is proud to be a gold sponsor of the conference.
The BioCommons sponsorship will bring Jason Williams for a keynote presentation on Tue 29 Nov. Jason is the Assistant Director External Collaborations, DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Education, Outreach, and Training lead for CyVerse – the U.S. National Cyberinfrastructure for Life Science. He is instrumental in several bioinformatics and computational biology training initiatives including The Carpentries and Life Science Trainers. After the conference Jason will stay on to work with bioinformatics educators and trainers from across the country (read more about Jason’s visit).
The BioCommons team are also excited to be attending the conference and are looking forward to hearing about the latest developments in bioinformatics and computational biology nationally and internationally. There will be many opportunities to connect with our team and find out more about BioCommons projects, infrastructure and services and how we can assist the life science research community.
Training and Communications Officer, Melissa Burke is co-hosting an education/training meetup over lunch on Tue 29 Nov with the ABACBS subcommittee on education and training. Everyone interested in bioinformatics education and training can meet Jason in a more relaxed setting, network with one another, and discuss challenges and opportunities, along with BioCommons’ Associate Director - Training and Communications, Christina Hall.
There will be lots of opportunities to hear about BioCommons projects and the ways we are supporting life science communities by providing digital infrastructure. At the COMBINE Symposium, there will be a talk and poster about our efforts towards ‘Developing a User Interface for Sharing Federated Genomic and Phenotypic Data Using the Beacon v2 protocol’.
Human Genomics Data Specialist, Marion Shadbolt will present a poster on behalf of our Humans Genomes Platform Project on ‘Enhancing Australia’s capability for secure and responsible sharing of human genome research data: The Human Genomes Platform Project’. There will also be a poster on ‘Establishing a national Beacon v2 network for real-time genomics data discovery.’
Our Deputy Director Jeff Christiansen is joining a panel discussion on ‘The fine line between data science vs bioinformatics’ as part of the Symposium on Bioinformatics Entrepreneurship and Industry on Thu 1 Dec.
Please come and chat - we’re looking forward to seeing you there!