ELIXIR community meets in Rome: ELIXIR 2017 All Hands meeting, 21-23 March

ELIXIR held its 3rd All Hands meeting last week in Rome, Italy. Hosting nearly 300 participants from ELIXIR Nodes and partner organisations, the meeting presented the work of ELIXIR Platforms and Use Cases and reviewed the progress over the past 12 months.

ELIXIR All Hands 2017 group picture

The programme featured 3 keynotes, ten plenary talks, 14 workshops, 30 flash talks and over 60 posters. The conference participants also paid tribute to Prof. Anna Tramontano who passed away a few weeks before the conference.

Keynote speeches

The conference keynotes presented different perspectives on bioinformatics infrastructures and bioinformatics research across the globe. Francis Ouellette from Genome Quebec talked about life-science infrastructure in Canada, Nicola Mulder from the Cape Town University in South Africa presented the H3Africa initiative, and Robert Gentleman gave an overview of genetics and drug discovery research in 23andMe.

EXCELERATE presentations

The All Hands meeting serves as the Annual General Meeting for the EXCELERATE project so 21 March served to review the work of the EXCELERATE Work Packages - each Platform and Use case gave a short update on their achievements so far and their plans for 2017.

Flash talks, poster session and workshops

The full breadth of ELIXIR activities was presented in the conference flash talks, poster sessions and workshops.

Three parallel sessions featured 30 flash talks, which covered specific aspects of ELIXIR Use Cases and Platforms as well as activities in ELIXIR Nodes; the poster session showcased over 60 posters from across ELIXIR.

The conference also hosted 14 workshops to discuss a range of topics, from eLearning and cloud resources to Node development and the ELIXIR Data management portal.

Next year in Berlin!

With nearly 300 participants, the 2017 All Hands meeting was by far ELIXIR's biggest community event. ELIXIR would like to thank all speakers and participants of the conference - we saw great and inspiring talks and had fruitful discussions about the future direction of ELIXIR.

The 2018 meeting will be hosted by ELIXIR Germany in Berlin.  See you there!

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