Latest News & Announcements

The Flemish minister for Innovation Hilde Crevits provides additional funding via the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for ELIXIR Belgium. These additional funds allow us to pursue our activities on the FAIRification of research data, the facilitation of reproducible analysis and offering integrated services for Plant Sciences and Human Data research. This will increase the availability of data which is of great importance for accelerating research.

We are looking for talented people to join our multidisciplinary team. If you’re interested in contributing to building the data research infrastructure for the future for life-sciences, one of these positions could be your next professional challenge.

We are proud to announce that ELIXIR Belgium received funds from the Flemish government for the coming two years. Our project “ELIXIR Infrastructure for Data and Services to strengthen Life-Sciences Research in Flanders”, focuses on data management, data analysis platforms, services in Human Data and Plant Sciences, and training. We have the ambitious goal of building a truly integrated Flemish community of bioinformatics infrastructure.

Both The Carpentries and ELIXIR are interested in supporting researchers and developers to build better software. Hence, the “ELIXIR Software development best practices” group, which is part of the ELIXIR Tools Platform, has proposed the “Four simple recommendations to encourage best practices in research software” (in short “4OSS”). These recommendations aim to improve quality and sustainability in research software development. Find the 4 recommendations here.

Last August, the CODATA summer school on Data Science took place in Trieste, Italy (link). Paula Martinez, ELIXIR Belgium’s data science and bioinformatics trainer, participated as R trainer at this summer school in the framework of the Implementation Study Learning Paths. For pictures of the workshop, click here.

ELIXIR Belgium is involved in a new Implementation Study “Crowd-sourcing the annotation of public proteomics datasets to improve data reusability” that aims to improve the reusability of public proteomics datasets. Ten ELIXIR nodes are involved in this study; Lennart Martens will represent ELIXIR Belgium”. The study will start on 1 June 2018 and run for a one-year period.

Scope of the study

For this study, ELIXIR Belgium teams up with four other ELIXIR nodes to "Extend open proteomics data analysis pipelines in the cloud". It is a joint effort of ELIXIR Belgium (Lennart Martens), ELIXIR Germany (Oliver Kohlbacher), ELIXIR France (David Bouyssié), ELIXIR Spain (Fernando Corrales, Eduard Sabido,) and EMBL-EBI (Juan Antonio Vizcaíno, Steven Newhouse). The study will start on 1 August 2018 and run for a one-year-period.

ELIXIR Belgium has joined forces with two other ELIXIR nodes in a new Implementation Study "Apple as a Model for Genomic Information Exchange" that will drastically improve both the visibility and accessibility of apple genomic data in public resources.

Paula Martinez joined the ELIXIR Belgium Training platform in December 2017. Paula is a data scientist with background in bioinformatics. She worked at The University of Queensland, Australia as specialized trainer for data analysis and data visualization. She is part of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry as instructor, maintainer, mentor and trainer. Paula will assist the Belgian ELIXIR node in providing FAIR data courses, applying data management strategies and developing workshops of the pipelining tool Galaxy and software best practices.

In order to help companies in Food, Nutrition and Microbiome to access and take advantage of the wealth of data being generated, ELIXIR and ELIXIR Belgium organised a two-day ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forum in October 2017 in Brussels. A complete report of the meeting (including presentations and photo's) can be found on the events page.