created by Geraldine_VdAuwera
on 2019-01-29
I can’t quite believe it’s been a full year since we released GATK4! The tools have evolved a lot since then, and as a matter of fact we’re due for another [major version](https://software.broadinstitute.org/gatk/documentation/article?id=23382) release very soon indeed. So we’re going to be talking a lot more about that over the next few weeks — specifically, the GATK developers are going to tell you all about their latest work in a series of guest posts on this very blog.
But before we get to all that cool new stuff, I want to take a moment to introduce you to the wonderful people who most recently joined us (the DSP* Communications Team) in our mission to help all of you make effective use of our tools in your work.
* DSP = Data Sciences Platform of the Broad Institute
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For context, our Comms team is dedicated to providing education, support and outreach for the software and services produced by the Data Sciences Platform at the Broad Institute (not just GATK anymore). It counts 10 people (excluding yours truly, since as Head Bureaucrat I barely do anything anymore), organized in two sub-teams: User Education under our Lead Educator Robert Majovski, and Frontline Support under our Senior Community Manager Tiffany Miller. You’ll hear more from both Robert and Tiffany in the near future.
Robert’s User Education team specializes in writing docs and developing educational materials. It includes veteran scientific writer Soo Hee Lee, who has penned much of our documentation, as well as newcomers Allie Hajian and Anton Kovalsky. So far Allie and Anton have mostly been rocking the cloud platform side of our world but you’ll likely start seeing their fingerprints in more of our GATK-related materials in the near future.
Tiffany’s Frontline Support team specializes in bringing you swift helpful answers through the forums and helpdesk. It includes pipelining veteran Beri Shifaw, the indispensable curator of [gatk-workflows](https://github.com/gatk-workflows) and associated [workspaces](https://software.broadinstitute.org/firecloud/documentation/article?id=9777) in [FireCloud](https://portal.firecloud.org/), as well as newcomers Bhanu Gandham, Sushma Chaluvadi and Adelaide Rhodes. They all contribute to providing top-notch frontline support across all our products, but you may recognize Bhanu in particular as the point person for GATK. You can expect to hear more from Bhanu on this blog in the very near future!
Both teams additionally contribute to developing resources like preloaded workspace in DSP’s cloud-based analysis platform, [FireCloud](https://software.broadinstitute.org/firecloud/), as well as developing and teaching workshops. All this cross-team work is facilitated by veteran forum specialist Kate Noblett in her current capacity as Senior Project Coordinator.
Please join me in welcoming our new team members —and appreciating our veterans— as we gear up for an exciting new season of GATK developments!
Updated on 2019-01-29
From NawarDalila on 2019-01-30
It has been pleasure reading and applying your work and I am sure it will be wonderful as well with the new teams. Waiting to read the new documentations specially the gCNV ones on GATK.
All the best
From asinglenet on 2019-02-04
I would like to meet some of the open source contributors, and I live in the Boston area. Does your team attend any meetings or events?