15/06/2016

BIB launches its website to boost visibility of catalan bioinformatic potential

• Bioinformatics Barcelona boosts its digital presence to become the meeting point for the bioinformatics community.
• The BIB website details the bioinformatic activities of 40 partners and over 80 research groups.
• The association aims to respond to the needs of all stakeholders involved in bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics Barcelona Association (BIB) launches its website www.bioinformaticsbarcelona.eu, which aims to be a reference in the bioinformatic sector at national and international level, and to become the platform for communication and interaction among BIB's partners. Through this website, the association has enhanced its digital presence to become a meeting-point facilitator of initiatives and a think tank for the bioinformatic community.

The portal contains sections on the BIB partners and their research groups in the bioinformatic field, and on education and training, job offers and internships, news, activities and news clipping, as well as a section with specific information on the association itself. Ferran Sanz, Director of GRIB is the Vice-President of the Association's Board of directors.

The website aims to boost the international visibility of our ready-and-available bioinformatic strength, which, through collaboration among partners and together with external agents, can extend current limits to achieve increasingly ambitious goals. In this sense, the website details the bioinformatic activities of 40 BIB partners and over 80 research groups. In particular, the research areas concentrating most activity are those of biomedical informatics, computational genomics, the bioinformatics of disease and treatment, systems biology, structural bioinformatics and drug design.

Particular attention is drawn to the training section, one of BIB's key strategic areas, which aims to bring together existing bioinformatic education and training in order to fulfil the needs of qualified professionals whose skills are increasingly in demand within diverse sectors.

• Vocational and Training Education (VET) of computer technicians with bioinformatic skills: pioneering studies in our context driven by the BIB, implemented since the 2015-16 academic year at the Institut Provençana andGimbernat Formació.
• Interuniversity Bachelor's Degree in Bioinformatics: this 3-year course of studies, taught entirely in English, will be jointly imparted from September 2016 by thePompeu Fabra University (UPF), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and the University of Barcelona (UB). This pioneering initiative within our context has been spearheaded by BIB.
• Master's degree in the field of bioinformatics, offered by several Catalan universities.
• Training at BIB: life-long learning courses offered both by the BIB or by any of its members.

As BIB evolves and expands its areas of action, the website will be updated with additional sections covering those new activities and projects. The launch of an intranet for the exclusive use of its members is also scheduled.

We encourage you to visit the website, to share its content on social networks and subscribe to the mailing list. We would also call on all BIB partners to upload their bioinformatic updates so that both the association website and its social networks can publish and disseminate the news, courses, activities and conferences relevant to our ambit.

Bioinformatics is a strategic discipline that applies computer science and information technologies to manage biological and related data.

BIB association was established to meet the need for the generation of synergies between biology and computer science, for a stronger union between these areas, and for the development of high-quality education and training programmes in the creation of bioinformatics talent. BIB is a non-profit association constituted in 2015; it currently has 40 partners in the field of bioinformatics in Catalonia, including universities, research centres, health research centres, large scientific infrastructures, companies and other institutions, developing their activity in the areas of health, agrifood and technology.

The aim of BIB is to promote and stimulate the provision of education and training, advanced research, knowledge and technology transfer, industrial competitiveness, scientific dissemination and to make visible the potential that we have as an international node in the field of bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics Barcelona is also supported by the Government of Catalonia and "la Caixa" Banking Foundation.

Download the attached document below with the Press release in English, Catalan and Spanish.