2017 Benjamin Franklin Award Finalists Announced
By Bio-IT World Staff
March 24, 2017 | Bioinformatics.org has announced five finalists for the 2017 Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences. Voting is open to Bioinformatics.org members on http://www.bioinformatics.org/franklin/, and will be open until March 31. The winner will be announced Thursday, May 25, 2017 onsite at the 2017 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo.
The Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatics.org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.
The 2017 finalists are:
Melissa Haendel, Oregon Health and Science University
Melissa Haendel has been a vocal and effective proponent of open science in a number of ways. Her group at OHSU develops open standards to facilitate semantically enabled research, research reproducibility, and data sharing. She is the PI for the Monarch Initiative, an international consortium that aims to develop software and integrate data to enable cross-species genotype to phenotype analysis and promote publication of data standards.
Rafael Irizarry, Harvard University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute
Rafael Irizarry has dedicated his career to developing methods and open source software for helping researcher’s genomics data. As a Biostatistician, he has made fundamental advances in the science of analyzing large, noisy, and biased genomics datasets. His contributions are particularly crucial in an era where archives are filling with tens of thousands of large open datasets; to re-use and combine these in any effective way requires a careful approach that considers technical confounders, batch effects, and other issues. See e.g. his work on Frozen robust multiarray analysis (fRMA) and The Gene Expression Barcode.
Francis Ouellette, Ontario Institute of Cancer Research
The themes of Francis Ouellette’s career have been open access and open data, connecting bioinformatics people and resources together, and supporting training and education. He coordinated GenBank, the world's largest open DNA sequence database at the NIH. In 2003, he began the Bioinformatics Links Directory, one of the first aggregations of bioinformatics open source software (doi:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gks632). He was an early supporter of PLOS and is an editor at PLOS Computational Biology Education, and an associate editor at Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation. He also supports open data and source through his position on various scientific advisory committees, including Saccharomyces Genome Database, the Galaxy project, GenomeSpace, H3ABioNet, and the NIH Human Microbiome Project. He advocates for bioinformatics training through the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops and bioinformatics.ca.
Frank W. Rockhold, Duke University Medical Center
Frank W. Rockhold has been a strong and consistent voice for greater access to clinical research data across his 40-year career in senior research positions at Lilly Research Laboratories, Merck Research Laboratories, and GlaxoSmithKline, where he retired as Senior Vice President of Global Clinical Safety and Pharmacovigilance, and is now a national leader and pioneer in efforts to increase data sharing and access. He was an instrumental leader in promoting opening industry data for public sharing. He has actively partnered with industry and academic sponsors of data sharing efforts and is one of the architects of the data sharing community. He also served on, and recently chaired, the board of directors of CDISC, the global, open, multidisciplinary, non-profit organization that has established standards to support the acquisition, exchange, submission, and archive of clinical research data and metadata.
Ioannis Xenarios, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Ioannis Xenarios has made decade-long contributions and tireless efforts in the development of open source databases and analytical tools in bioinformatics. He is the Director of two groups at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics: the Swiss-Prot group based at the University of Geneva and the Vital-IT group based at the University of Lausanne.