The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA), jointly hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion the EGA is hosting a symposium co-located with the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Plenary meeting in Basel at 4pm on 5th October 2018.

The symposium is for anyone with an interest in human genetic or phenotypic controlled access data. There will be presentations on the EGA, data sharing, and how the EGA is proposing to become a federated resource to deal with the challenges of distributing and sharing increasing volumes of genetic data. The symposium gives a networking opportunity directly after the GA4GH Plenary – but attendence at the GA4GH plenary is not required to attend the EGA Symposium.

Agenda
16:00 – 16:15 Welcome and Introduction, Jordi Rambla (CRG)
16:15 – 16:45 “Sharing human data: why, how and what can we achieve?”, Serena Scollen (ELIXIR Europe)
16:45 – 17:15 “Challenges and opportunities in data sharing infrastructure in Africa”, Nicola Mulder (University of Cape Town & H3Africa)
17:15 – 17:45 Coffee break
17:45 – 18:15 “The EGA: 10 years of Ethical Genomic Access”, Adrian Thorogood (McGill University)
18:15 – 18:45 “The future of EGA in a world of federated human data”, Thomas Keane (EMBL-EBI)
19:00 – 21:00 Drinks & Canapés

A full agenda and registration is available here.

Biographies

    Jordi Rambla

Jordi Rambla is a biologist MSc with a long experience in diverse areas of IT and management. He is a member of the EGA team since 2013. He is participating in several H2020, ELIXIR and GA4GH projects to foster secure human bio-molecular and phenotypic data sharing.

    Serena Scollen

Serena Scollen is the Head of Human Genomics and Translational Data at ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for bioinformatics and life-science data, based in Hinxton, UK. Her vision is to ensure data that can be shared, will be shared responsibly. She is working with scientists across Europe to establish standards and infrastructure to facilitate discoverability, access, sharing and analysis of genomics data, linked to other data types and at a scale that has not previously been achieved. Developing infrastructure will unleash new possibilities for genomics and health.
Prior to joining ELIXIR, she was a Director within the Human Genetics and Computational Biomedicine group at Pfizer. In this role, she led and implemented a genetic and precision medicine strategy to support drug target selection and clinical programmes for the Pain and Sensory Disorders Research Unit. She was also a member of the ABPI Stratified Medicine Working Group. Earlier in her career, she worked within the Toxicogenomics group at GlaxoSmithKline. She gained postdoctoral experience at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, with a focus on the genetic susceptibility to disease.

    Nicola Mulder

Prof Mulder heads the Computational Biology Division at the University of Cape Town, and leads H3ABioNet, a large Pan African Bioinformatics Network of 27 institutions in 16 African countries. H3ABioNet aims to develop bioinformatics capacity to enable genomic data analysis on the continent by developing and providing access to and skills and computing infrastructure for data analysis. Prior to her position at UCT, she worked for 9 years at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, as a Team Leader, responsible for the development of InterPro, a heavily used bioinformatics resource at the Institute. At UCT her research focuses on genetic determinants of susceptibility to disease, African genome variation, and microbial genomics and infectious diseases from both the host and pathogen perspectives. Her group also provides bioinformatics services for the local researchers, through which they develop visualization and analysis tools for high-throughput biology. Her team led the design of the H3Africa genotyping array and has also been involved in the development of new and improved algorithms for the analysis of complex African genetic data as well as for downstream analysis and interpretation of GWAS data. Prof Mulder is actively involved in training and education as well as curriculum development in Bioinformatics and Genomic Medicine.

    Adrian Thorogood

Adrian Thorogood is a lawyer and academic researcher based at the Centre of Genomics and Policy, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His research explores legal barriers and facilitators for international, open science in genomics. He is also the Manager of the Regulatory and Ethics Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health.

    Thomas Keane

Thomas Keane is Team Leader for the European Genome Phenome Archive (EGA), the European Variation Archive (EVA), as well as the Archival Infrastructure for the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at EMBL-EBI. He is responsible for strategic planning for EGA, ENA (Archival Infrastructure) and EVA, is a member of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) steering committee and leads the Large-Scale Genomics workstream. He is the scientific lead for the Mouse Genomes Project, a collaboration with the Wellcome Sanger Institute.