The 9th webinar in BioExcel’s webinar series on computational methods and applications for biomolecular research took place on 23rd November 2016.

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Cath Brooksbank from EMBL-EBI talks about the work that is underway to define training requirements for biomolecular researchers with high computational needs.

BioExcel webinars include an audience Q&A session during which attendees can ask questions and make suggestions.

This is the first webinar from the BioExcel Training Interest Group. The Training IG is for you if you are responsible for or have an interest in training within your institute or project or are a training professional (trainer, coordinator, lecturer) in a life sciences and/or computational field.

Register for webinar

Title: Defining training requirements for biomolecular researchers with high computational needs
Date: 23rd November, 2016
Time: 15:00 CET
Please register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6968870002177235715. You will then receive an email with details of how you can connect to the webinar.

Defining training requirements for Biomolecular researchers with high computational needs

Vera Matser and Cath Brooksbank
European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
orcid.org/0000-0002-2010-6844 and orcid.org/0000-0001-9395-7001 

Life Science research has become increasingly digital and has a direct influence on our daily life in areas such as health and medical applications, drug discovery, agriculture and food industry. It is one of the largest and fastest growing communities in need of high-end computing, leading to an increasing number of life science researchers who are not computing experts but who need to use complicated computationally intensive biomolecular modelling tools.

The BioExcel Training Programme is aimed at supporting these academic and industrial researchers in the use of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-throughput computing (HTC). To make sure that the biomedical research communities can fully profit from the training offered through the Centre of Excellence we have determined the training needs for three user groups (Entry Level Users, Specialist Users and System Administrators & Applications Experts) by drafting a competency profile. The competencies have been determined with the aid of the community and sent out for wider consultation.

To enrich the competency profile we have, for each competence, defined what an individual will need to know and what skills they need to have to exhibit competence in a specific area, as well as list what behaviours are suited and unsuited to an individual with that particular competency – so that individuals can assess their own competence in each area and select appropriate training.

The competencies have been mapped against existing training (online as well as face-to-face courses) to reveal where gaps in training resources are present. The BioExcel Training Programme will focus on developing new training courses and material to fill the gaps in training resources.

This webinar will present the completed BioExcel Competency profile, the gap analysis and the plans for the BioExcel Training Programme. In additional we want to make everyone aware and if relevant to you, invite you to join the newly formed BioExcel Training Interest Group.

The Training Interest Group has the following aims:

  • Improve visibility of training initiatives and individual courses/resources. Members of the Training IG will be able to act as liaisons to other training initiatives.
  • Facilitate collaboration between projects to promote best practice and efficient use of resources.
  • Improve communication between “computational trainers” and “life science trainers”.
  • Promote the importance of high quality training

The Training IG is for you if you are responsibility for or have an interest in training within your institute or project or are a training professional (trainer, coordinator, lecturer) in a life sciences and/or computational field.

Discuss this webinar View slides on SlideShare  Join Interest Group