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DATA SCIENTISTS FOR LIFE - INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS FOR RESEARCH AND SOCIETY - SWITZERLAND ON THE INTERNATIONAL MAP
Among global leaders to sustain biological knowledge SIB is the voice of Switzerland in global issues affecting biological and biomedical data science. A panorama.
Education and capacity building at the service of global pandemic preparedness SIB’s Training group is co-leading capacity-building efforts to tackle the data challenges that can hinder an effective pandemic response as part of the ELIXIR BY-COVID project, which brings together 53 partners from across 19 countries in Europe.
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scientific advances are made possible thanks to the seamless exchange of knowledge derived from data – within, but also across countries, which raises several challenges. Switzerland, with its unique model of national organization for data science in biology and biomedicine, is very well placed on the global scene in this respect. Through capacity building, conferences, knowledgebases, thought leadership and durable partnerships, SIB conveys the expertise of the Swiss bioinformatics community applied to biodiversity, oncology, epidemiology and many other topics.
Joining forces on responsible sharing of genomic data for the benefit of human health Several SIB Members contributed to a 2021 special issue of the journal Cell Genomic, summing up the purpose and advances of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), of which SIB is a member. This is a worldwide initiative to accelerate biomedical advances by enabling the responsible sharing of clinical and genomic data.
Influential contributions to the scientific debate amidst the COVID crisis Among the numerous research articles produced in the face of the pandemic, SIB Members also contributed as thought leaders through letters and opinion pieces in prestigious journals such as: Nature, with SIB scientists co-leading a global group of researchers calling for better integration of viral genetics, bioinformatics and public health to enable an efficient pandemic response (Christophe Dessimoz and Emma Hodcroft). DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-00525-x Science, with two SIB scientists among the three Europe-based authors on the letter regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (Richard Neher and Erik van Nimwegen). DOI: 10.1126/science.abj0016