ELIXIR and the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI) have built on their partnership with a staff exchange to facilitate knowledge sharing.
The five-month exchange, funded by ELIXIR, brought together five ELIXIR Nodes (Greece, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and the UK), the ELIXIR Hub and NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG).
Activities included a series of Zoom meetings, two technical webinars and the visit of Ana Teresa Freitas, ELIXIR Portugal Head of Node, to the DCEG.
The first technical webinar explored federated learning with ELIXIR Portugal presenting the Flower framework and DCEG presenting the Yjs library. The second webinar focused on trusted research environments with presentations from the EU-funded project EOSC-ENTRUST, coordinated by ELIXIR, and the NIH STRIDES Initiative.
Ana Teresa Freitas’ visit focused on advancing federated solutions for human data preservation and research access while maintaining compliance with the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. There were also discussions on facilitating cross-institutional data access and sharing.
The staff exchange complements ongoing activities between the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) and ELIXIR, which were formalised in a Memorandum of Agreement earlier this year. Activities include joint representation on editorial boards, participation in mutual interest groups and collaboration on global standards projects.
Connections between DCEG and ELIXIR Portugal will be maintained through two ELIXIR Portugal students collaborating directly with DCEG. Find out more ELIXIR and NIH sign Memorandum of Agreement NIH STRIDES Initiative ELIXIR’s International Strategy.
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