Education Summit 2021

The Bioinformatics Education summit provides an opportunity for a global community of bioinformatics educators to work together on applying and developing bioinformatics education and training standards, particularly the ISCB Competency Framework. The past two summits have helped us to get version 3 of the framework to the point of publication, and a manuscript and guidelines are now at an advanced stage of development. The framework itself has been finalised and made openly available on the EMBL-EBI competency hub. Some of the participants in the summit will also be familiar with a related (albeit much simpler) framework developed in 2015 by a UK-based task and finish group on clinical bioinformatics as part of a broader piece of work to produce recommendations to the UK government on skills needed to enable clinical practitioners to embrace genomic medicine.

Competency framework extension to Data science in Clinical Practice has been selected at the topic of the day for Day 1 (Monday 24 May) and, like the other sessions, will be a ‘round the globe’ effort in which we will collaborate to adapt the ISCB competency framework to make it relevant to bioinformatics in clinical-decision-making settings.

1. Sanity check v. 3 of the framework and its associated guidelines and discuss the dissemination strategy

2. Agree on a roadmap to broaden the ISCB framework to be applicable to bioinformatics in clinical practice, and start work on these activities

• Submission-ready paper and guidelines (current co-authors and volunteer peer reviewers)

• Agreed process for extension to clinical practice (and potentially to other fields)

• Early drafts of additional competencies (e.g. personas and draft competency levels for clinical practice roles)