Australia’s new Nextflow Ambassadors connect users to global community

Nextflow has emerged as a standard for defining bioinformatics workflows. Australian BioCommons is responding to increased use of Nextflow in the life sciences by convening the Bioinformatics Workflows community, offering Nextflow training, and standing up an Australian Nextflow Seqera Service. Now, Australia has two Nextflow Ambassadors to support the researcher community.

Dr Georgie Samaha and Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan have been awarded positions in the Nextflow Ambassador Program to ensure Australian users are represented on the global stage. The program fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, and community growth. 

Georgie is the bioinformatics group lead of the Sydney Informatics Hub at the University of Sydney and is passionate about making bioinformatics more accessible for researchers. She works with BioCommons to develop public digital infrastructure and leads the BioCommons BioCLI project.

I’m excited to help bridge the gap between life scientists using Nextflow and technical experts. As ambassadors we can understand their needs and voice them directly to Seqera

Ziad is Product Manager, Bioinformatics Platforms at Australian BioCommons and enjoys uplifting life scientists to achieve their research outcomes in two BioCommons services:  ABLeS and the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service. 

I’m looking forward to acting as a local contact for Nextflow users, and helping to build a national Nextflow capability that can contribute best practice workflows to the international community.

Dr Geraldine Van der Auwera, Lead Developer Advocate at Seqera (the company behind Nextflow), is looking forward to meeting the ambassadors in person when she visits Australia in September:

We're thrilled to have Georgie and Ziad join the Nextflow Ambassadors! We're keenly aware of the distance and time-related challenges that exist between Australia and other Nextflow hubs, so we expect that having not one, but two ambassadors available to share their expertise with their local networks will make a big difference! We’re hopeful that their localised support, training, and knowledge sharing will ensure that researchers and institutions across Australia can utilise Nextflow effectively in their work.

Both ambassadors have hit the ground running, with Ziad presenting at the upcoming Nextflow Summit Barcelona 2024, and Georgie playing a key role in organising national training events like the upcoming Hello Nextflow! workshop.

Georgie and Ziad are assessing interest in the formation of an informal Australian Nextflow network that would benefit life scientists, and they want to hear from you! If you use Nextflow, or are planning to in the near future, share your thoughts by filling out this brief survey.