This staff exchange program aims at enhancing the collaboration of the Portuguese and Swiss Nodes to initiate collaborative training in data management and bioinformatics with Brazilian R&I organisations.
The participants intend to collectively plan and deliver a course in biological data management, during which ELIXIR resources and guidelines related to data management will feature heavily. Parallel to this, initial discussions will start to assess the possibility of sharing experiences about Train-the-Trainer initiatives in ELIXIR and in the Brazilian organisations involved, thereby fostering future collective initiatives.
Altogether, it is anticipated that the project will usefully raise ELIXIR’s visibility with, and appreciation by, Brazilian bioinformaticians, notably with regards to ELIXIR’s resources and know-how. Data management skills of approx 15 life scientists will be improved.
Ongoing activities to establish national leagues of bioinformatics students in Portugal and Brazil will have a milestone in March 2023, at the Bioinformatics Open Days (BOD), foreseen at University of Minho (Portugal), where representatives of Brazil are also expected. The Portuguese league (https://lpb.dei.uc.pt/) has been started this year, fostered by the Brazilian experience (https://lbb.ime.usp.br/home), and will run from December 2022 to March 2023, with a scientific committee of experts from Europe and Brazil, and featuring the participation of teams from the EU and South America.
This will be mimicked in the Brazilian league to start early 2023 and finish in June 2023, in the X-Meeting 2023, the international conference of the Brazilian Association for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, which will be held on Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, from the 13th to the 16th of June 2023 (https://www.x-meeting.com/events/), co-located with the proposed course. These initiatives are student-driven competitions aimed to foster interest in the Bioinformatics field.