Keele faculty member attends EBI workshop on 'Bioinformatics for PIs'
"June saw us introducing a group of Principal Investigators working across the Life Sciences to the challenges, promises and pitfalls of introducing or increasing the bioinformatics capabilities of their teams. Our more usual course audience would be the PhD students and post-docs that make up their teams, so this was an interesting course for both trainees and trainers!" - EBI course report
In June Dr Merrick attended the inaugural EBI course on 'Bioinformatics for PIs' held at Cambridge's Genome Campus.
This new workshop at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) aimed to address everything from 'bioinformatics as a science', through to data management planning, competencies for team building and bioinformatics collaborations. Dr Merrick competed for a place amongst the 25 attendees because her current research projects are taking an increasingly 'omic' direction, and many PIs - themselves trained as geneticists and molecular biologists - feel under-prepared for the new world of biological 'big data'. Trainers were brought in from across EMBL-EBI and from organisations such as ELIXIR and Cambridge University, and 25 PIs joined the course from locations including the UK, Europe, the US, China and Puerto Rico. The EBI, which is centrally funded by European member states, is a vital resource for biologists across Europe and worldwide: it exemplifies the benefits to UK scientists of European collaboration.
Picture shows workshop attendees in the EBI foyer (Dr Merrick second from left, back row)