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BOSC 2017 Keynote Speakers
BOSC 2017 is pleased to announce the following keynote speakers:
Madeleine Ball
Madeleine Ball is Executive Director of Open Humans Foundation and co-founder of Open Humans, a nonprofit project enabling individuals to engage studies and share data.
Open Humans is an open source online platform and community, created through funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Open Humans enables members to connect data from a variety of sources, including genome, microbiome, activity tracking, and GPS data – and then invites members to share their data with projects and work with research studies. By using an individual-centered approach, Open Humans enables new research opportunities, including: data sharing by individuals, cohort sharing across studies, anonymous engagement with studies, and citizen-led projects.
Dr. Ball is also supported by a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship, supporting her continued vision for new approaches to openness in human health research and data sharing. Previously, Dr. Ball was Director of Research at the Harvard Personal Genome Project. Through the Personal Genome Project and Open Humans, Dr. Ball works with colleagues in diverse fields, including genomics, human-computer interaction, diabetes, health behavior research, and citizen science. Through this work, she has extensive experience with human subjects research, data sharing, participatory research, technology solutions, and associated ethical and regulatory issues.
Dr. Ball's keynote talk topic is "Open Sourcing Ourselves."
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.
Dr. Loman's talk title is "Open data meets ubiquitous sequencing: challenges and opportunities."
Dr. Loman will also be one of the panelists for our panel on Open Data--Standards, Opportunities and Challenges.
