Bioinformatic developments are increasingly important throughout the field of life science research. This development is of course not limited to Utrecht. That’s why UBC is involved in several national initiatives. I would like to tell you more about the role of the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center within Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology and the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences.
National coordination
In the Netherlands, we have two organisations that coordinate bioinformatics activities on a national level. In their activities, these organisations together provide a healthy and dynamic bioinformatics landscape within the Netherlands.
- The Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (BioSB) research school is building a national community for the scientific development and education of bioinformatics and computational systems biology.
- The Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences is a public-private partnership that seeks to improve research infrastructure to enable cross-technology life science research in national and international collaborations. DTL coordinates the Dutch node for ELIXIR, a large European project building a distributed infrastructure for life science information.
The role of the UBC
Members of the UBC play an important role in these organisations. For example, Jeroen de Ridder (BioSB) played a key role in the organisation of the European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB), and Patrick Kemmeren has a seat in the DTL scientific team. This all means that the UBC is ideally positioned to benefit from, and steer, national developments that deal with research and infrastructure plans with major bioinformatic components such as Health-RI or Bioscopy. And we are well positioned to connect you to a diverse national network if you cannot find someone with the bioinformatics expertise you need within Utrecht University.
Kind regards,
Berend Snel