Bioinformatics Barcelona presents strategic plan for coming years
The new platform, which already has 44 member organizations, aims to promote the bioinformatics sector in Catalonia
Bioinformatics Barcelona (BiB), the platform to promote bioinformatics in Catalonia, has presented its strategic plan at an event presided over by Antoni Castellà, secretary of Universities and Research at CaixaForum Barcelona. Noteworthy attendees included Mateo Valero, director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS); Enric Banda, director of the Department of Science and the Environment at the “la Caixa” Foundation; Antoni Esteve, president of the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRi), and Roderic Guigó, coordinator of the bioinformatics and genomics program at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG). In this plan, the BiB defines its priorities in terms of visibility, training, collaboration, research and transfer.
One of the platform’s lines of action in its first years will be to develop a bioinformatics portal to boost the visibility of organizations in the sector as a group, bring them together and promote them jointly as a cluster. It aims to promote multidisciplinary research, training and the transfer of knowledge and technology in the bioinformatics arena, and to foster collaborative initiatives that apply computational sciences to biological data. Moreover, the BiB aims to unify the degree in Bioinformatics in all universities in Catalonia and encourage entrepreneurship in this field.
The BiB is a platform promoted by the Government of Catalonia and the “la Caixa” Foundation. It now has 44 members: 13 research centers and hospital institutes, 10 universities, 12 companies in the sector, 3 large-scale facilities and 6 additional institutions, including Biocat.
The platform is led by Chair of Architecture and Computer Technology and former Rector of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) Ana Ripoll. Scientific Director is Ferran Sanz, chair of Biomedical Informatics at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and director of the GRIB research program in biomedical informatics (UPF-IMIM).
The BiB is organizing, together with B·Debate, the session "Big Data in Biomedicine. Challenges and Opportunities" for the coming November. B·Debate is a scientific debate initiative from Biocat and Obra Social "la Caixa".
More information is available in the BiB press release.