Julia Kelliher Organizes and Presents at Microbiome Data Management in Action Workshop

Julia Kelliher Organizes and Presents at Microbiome Data Management in Action Workshop

Julia Kelliher, a Research Technologist in the Bioscience Division at LANL and a Research Scientist at the New Mexico Consortium, recently organized and presented at the Microbiome Data Management in Action Workshop held June 12-13, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Microbiome Data Management in Action Workshop brought together key decision makers in microbiome science to discuss recent progress and challenges, and suggest recommendations and paths forward for environmental microbiome data management. This workshop sought to advance microbiome science by promoting a coordinated data management ecosystem across researchers, funders, data repositories, and publishers. The event brought together diverse microbiome science stakeholders that represent the interdisciplinary nature of microbiome research, including ecologists, data scientists, modelers, microbiologists, and bioinformaticians, with this group of invitees including groups underrepresented in science and engineering.

This workshop is the first of its kind to take local and national priorities and form an actionable strategy for implementation of environmental microbiome data management best practices across diverse sectors of microbiome research. Results and subsequent follow-on activities of the workshop will form the basis of a formalized checklist to be implemented across journals, funding agencies, and repositories for microbiome data management. These best practices will facilitate novel scientific insights now and in the future as microbiome data continues to be used in modeling and machine learning efforts.

Attendees of the workshop spent the one and a half days in productive discussions, panels, presentations, and small-group work to critically examine the current state of microbiome data management and provide actionable insights into the future of implementing standards to ensure that microbiome data generated from environments, non-human hosts, synthetic communities, and built environments are FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) for years to come.

By attending, participants of this workshop were able to enhance professional connections with publishers, funders, data repositories, and senior microbiome researchers. Participants were also invited to continue collaborating through a voluntary inter-agency working group. This working group will be publishing the insights from this workshop soon.

This workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation.

If you would like to learn more about these efforts or get involved with the development of these guidelines, visit: https://streamsmicrobiome.org.