BOSC 2017 keynote speakers
We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2017, and our first sponsors.
But first a final reminder – today (Thursday 13 April 2017) is our deadline for submitting a full length talk abstract to BOSC 2017.
Dawn Field
Dawn Field is a Lamberg International Guest Professor at Göteborg University’s Department of Marine Sciences. Previously she was a senior research fellow at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Head of the Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK, and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. She is also a founder of the Genomic Standards Consortium, the Genomic Observatories Network and Ocean Sampling Day.
Dr. Field is credited with introducing the concept of a biological code, or “biocode” – the sum of all DNA on earth. In their book Biocode: The New Age of Genomics, she and coauthor Neil Davies describe the rapid rise of genomics, how it is revealing the scale and diversity of life on Earth, and future possibilities and implications.
Dr. Field’s advocacy for open data and interoperability is epitomized by her past leadership of the Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC), which aims to facilitate genomic data integration, discovery and comparison through international community-driven standards.
The title of Dr. Field’s keynote talk is “Understanding the Biocode: Global Sharing of Data.”
Nick Loman
Nick Loman
is known as a vocal proponent of open genomic data in healthcare. A Professor of Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham, Dr. Loman explores the use of cutting-edge genomics and metagenomics approaches to human pathogens. He promotes the use of open data to facilitate the surveillance and treatment of infectious disease.
Dr. Loman helped establish real-time genomic surveillance of Ebola in Guinea and Zika in Brazil (via the ZiBRA project, which states that “Data will be subject to open release as it is generated”). In another recent project, real-time genomic data was used to analyze a small outbreak of Salmonella enteritidis in the UK. Through this sharing of genomic datasets, researchers were able to confirm that the cases were linked to a larger, national-scale outbreak. Dr. Loman is one of the authors of Poretools, and he regularly shares cutting-edge Nanopore data and protocols for using it. In collaboration with Lex Nederbragt, Dr. Loman is developing an open-source repository of sequencing and bioinformatics benchmarking datasets called Seqbench.
BOSC 2017 Sponsors
We are grateful to and welcome The Hyve (open source solutions for bioinformatics) and Mozilla Science Lab (a community of researchers, developers, and librarians making research open and accessible), as the first sponsors for BOSC 2017.
If you would like to be a sponsor of BOSC, please contact us at bosc@open-bio.org.