Weekly Brief 18 February 2019

Updates from Platforms

The Bioschemas committee is planning the next Face-to-Face meeting and now surveying for candidate venue and dates. Tentative agenda includes defining new profiles and specifications, tooling, and marking up of new resources. Please fill in the survey of your suggested date and venue.

ELIXIR Switzerland has developed an e-learning module on High Performance Computing for Life Sciences, as a part of ELIXIR-EXCELERATE Training WP. It was designed for beginners in using the HPC clusters, to be used either as an electronic component of a blended training course, or as a self-learning module.

The (Dutch) ZonMw funded project Towards a community-endorsed data steward profession description for Life Science research created a Zenodo Community with the first deliverable - a matrix, that may function as the basis for a common job description of a data steward - now available. This matrix will be complemented by knowledge, skills and competencies of a data steward, which will be translated into concrete learning objectives. These in turn will be used to develop an education line and training material for data stewards (including a design for an eLearning module). We welcome feedback of the community.

We are organising Biohackathon 2019 again in Paris on 18-22 November, please reserve the date. The official call for projects will launch around 15 March, but we would appreciate if you register expressions of interest for leading a project to the spreadsheet to help planning of the event.

Updates from Communities

The computational methods and analysis platform developed by the ELIXIR Marine Metagenomics Community helped identify unknown bacteria in the human gut. Read about the new paper from EMBL-EBI and Sanger Institute.

Updates from Nodes

The 4th Instruct Biennial Structural Biology Conference will take place on 22-24 May 2019 in Alcala de Henares (Madrid, Spain). The registration is now open, the abstracts can be submitted until 1 March 2019. Student fellowships and Women in Science fellowships are available with the deadline on 1 March.

Applications open for the ELIXIR-Carpentry Instructor Training event in Stockholm, Sweden on 3-4 April 2019

ELIXIR Netherlands hosted a whorkshop/hackathon Boost Your Visibility Improving F of FAIR for Dutch Training and Data Resources through Bioschemas on 7-8 February 2019 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. During the event, experts from several ELIXIR Nodes (France, Germany, United Kingdom, EMBL-EBI) and the Netherlands presented how they annotate different resources with Bioschemas. In the second part, the participants focused on multiple challenges, from updating the Bioschemas profiles based on new input to harmonise the collection of training resource information in the Netherlands.

Applications are still open for the ELIXIR Italy Single Cell RNA Sequencing and Data Analysis Course, on 7-9 May 2019 at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine near Naples, Italy. Academic fee is 350. Travel grants are available. Deadline for applications: 16 March.

Job board

All vacancies are also published on the ELIXIR website vacancies section (also including vacancies from industry). Submit vacancies from your Node or industry partners.

The Algarve Centre for Marine Sciences (CCMAR, part of ELIXIR Portugal) is hiring a Junior Researcher to work in the context of the EOSC-Life project.

The Maimonides Biomedical Research Institute of Crdoba (IMIBIC, part of ELIXIR Spain) is looking for Bioinformatician to optimize the use of the available technological resources and computational infrastructure of IMIBIC.

SIB Training and sciCORE (ELIXIR Switzerland groups) are looking for a Bioinformatics Training and Support Specialist to support training and research services.

ELIXIR Belgium is opening a couple of positions, all based in Gent at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB):

Upcoming events

The ELIXIR TeSS portal has a variety of interesting events and courses organised by the ELIXIR Nodes.

ELIXIR events