BD2K is an initiative of the U.S. National Institute of Health to establish a digital ecosystem for biomedical research. The All Hands Grantee Meeting held on 12-13 November 2015 in Bethesda, Maryland, brought together all participants and grantees in BD2K. Carole Goble (ELIXIR UK Node) attended as an ELIXIR representative. Also attending from ELIXIR were Janet Thornton, Susanna Sansone and Henning Hermjakob. Susanna and Henning are investigators on BD2K awards.
Around 350-400 people attended the meeting over the two days. The range of grantees is impressive – a number of early career and established cyber-infrastructure and computing specialists as well as the expected biomedical investigators and computational biomedicine reseachers.
BD2K is a $100 million per annum coordinated programme of work, and the range and ambition is impressive. The progress is visible already after the first year, and there was a positive vibe of a real opportunity for change. The two days was an agenda of plenary talks, posters, demos, breakout sessions, and programme meetings, including a plenary ELIXIR presentation by Janet and Carole, which was very well received and raised awareness of ELIXIR work among the US bioinformatics community.
Video recordings from all plenary sessions are now available online: Day 1 | Day 2.