Ter@tec

Computational challenges in Life Sciences Research Infrastructures

Alvis BRAZMA
Senior Team Leader, Functional Genomics, EMBL/EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute)

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Abstract : The need for robust computational and information infrastructure became clear at the beginning of the Human Genome Project (HGP) over 20 years ago. Since then life sciences have joined the community of “big science” – the requirements of the project that followed HGP, such as 1000 genome project, ENCODE and the International Cancer Genome Consortium have entered Peta- and are approaching Exa-scale for data management, sharing and computing. The European computing infrastructure ELIXIR, which unites Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the massive amounts of data being generated has been established. ELIXIR will provide the facilities necessary for life science researchers - from bench biologists to cheminformaticians - to make the most of our rapidly growing store of information about living systems, which is the foundation on which our understanding of life is built. In my talk I will be discussing the computational challenges of ELIXIR and other life sciences research infrastructures.

Biography : Dr Alvis Brazma studied mathematics at the University of Latvia, Riga, before obtaining his PhD in computer science from the Moscow State University. His doctoral work concerned automatic learning of algorism form sequences of actions. In 1997 he joined the European Bioinformatics Institute and was among the first scientists to use microarray data to study gene regulation. In 1999 he founded the Microarray Gene Expression Data society and raised funding to start a microarray database at EBI – ArrayExpress, which is now one of the major international repositories for functional genomics data. His main research interests concern integrative data analysis to reveal patterns of gene and protein expression in normal and diseased state. He has over hundred scientific publications and is a Principal Investigator on several large collaborative genomics and biomedical projects, including the kidney cancer project of the International Cancer Genome Consortium.