!!Lecture Series “Frontiers in Biosciences”
__Date:__ 30 September 2014, 18:00 – 19:00\\
__Location:__ BBMRI‐ERIC HQ – Neue Stiftingtalstraße 2/B/6, 8010 Graz
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BBMRI‐ERIC in collaboration with BBMRI.at are sponsoring a new lecture series under the auspices of
Academia Europaea, bringing international top scientists in the field of research infrastructures and
biomedical sciences to Graz. This will be a series of lectures hosted at the premises of BBMRI‐ERIC.
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[{Image src='Blomberg_Niklas.png' caption='' height='180' alt='Niklas Blomberg' class='image_left'}]
!Dr. Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Director

Dr. Blomberg joined [ELIXIR|http://www.elixir-europe.org] as Director in 2013 following 14 years in the
pharmaceutical industry with AstraZeneca. He led the global cheminformatic
function from 2006‐2011 with responsibility for global delivery of novel
computational approaches and external partnerships in screening, and in
2011‐2013 led the build of new computational biology / computational
chemistry unit for the AZ inflammatory research area. He has also previously
been the Chairman of the board for Bioinformatics for Life Science in Sweden
(BILS), Chair of the advisory board for the Swedish e‐Science for Cancer
prevention and cure project, Advisory board member for the Swedish eScience center and the IMI
eTRIKS project. He was co‐chair for IMI OpenPHACTS, a project with 24 industrial and academic
partners to develop standards and infrastructure for effective data‐interoperability across chemistry
and biology for drug‐discovery research.
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*__Jan‐Eric Litton:__ Welcome and introduction of the speaker
*__Niklas Blomberg:__ The ELIXIR bioinformatics infrastructure: Data, Computing and Services to Communities
*Discussion including wine and cheese tasting
!!Abstract
The mission of ELIXIR is to construct and operate a sustainable infrastructure for the sharing of
biological information throughout Europe, to support life science research and drive its translation to
medicine and the environment, the bio‐industries and society. The challenges in storing, integrating
and analyzing the data from modern biological experiments are real; ELIXIR meets this challenge
through a distributed e‐infrastructure of bioinformatics services built around established European
centers of excellence.
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This talk will discuss some of the challenges in meeting the transformation of biological research into
a big data driven science: handling, analyzing and archiving large and also highly diverse data‐sets. As
ELIXIR is currently embarking upon its construction phase it has commissioned pilot‐actions to look at
issues related to accessing very large datasets. Furthermore the talk will discuss experiences in data
integration and the need for establishing data‐management plans within projects that address the
issues of meta‐data annotation and long term archiving. 
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Download [document|frontiers_in_bio_sciences_sep_2014.pdf]
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