Dear Fellow Trainers,
LifeSciTrainers started with a tweet on November 10th, 2018. Now, just under a year later we are excited to announce the formation of a Steering Committee to help develop concrete ideas around topics and conversations that have been happening since that time.
The Founding Steering Committee members are all volunteers who have stepped up to give a little time and share their expertise, experience, and passion. We are super happy about and committed to the diversity this group represents.
The members of the LifeSciTrainers Founding Steering Committee are:
- Allissa Dilman, National Institutes of Health – USA
- Jessica Lindvall, ELIXIR-SE, National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden – Sweden
- Adrien Melquiond, Utrecht University Medical Center – The Netherlands
- Sonika Tyagi, Monash University – Australia
- Ahmed Moustafa, American University in Cairo – Egypt
- Sateesh Peri, University of Arizona – USA
- Jason Williams, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory – USA
On the 26th of September 2019 this group of enthusiastic people from America, Europe, Australia, and Africa, met virtually with the mission to set up the committee and to discuss how we see LifeSciTrainer’s future. Our important questions included how we to align with established educational organizations within the Bioinformatics community, such as GOBLET, ELIXIR, The Carpentries, and others. Diversity is clearly our strength, and we believe this diversity of represented countries, cultures, and backgrounds will benefit the future of the community, locally and worldwide. In order for the community to keep growing and also to best align with other organizations efforts, we wanted to ensure that tasks we perform in our work at our respective universities organizations could be of added value also for this community. Many of us are already involved in and have insights into the work contributed by other organizations locally and globally.
The road ahead is now to formalize the LifeSciTrainers Steering Committee as well as to articulate a vision and with clear and concrete deliverables. As a Steering Committee, we will meet quarterly, and work on objectives to continue to build the LifeSciTrainers community of practice.
Some important possible objectives include:
- A survey of the existing community to get to know what you’d like to see
- Working to promote inclusion, diversity, and code-of-conduct for all life science training
- Promoting future virtual and regional activities to highlight and promote the work of community members
We look forward to working with everyone and welcome your suggestions through Slack and our new email (info@lifescitrainers.org).
On behalf of the Steering Committee,
Jessica and Jason