Luísa Pereira joins the Scientific Council of european life sciences organization

Researcher Luísa Pereira, leader of the “Genetic Diversity” research group, was recently invited to join the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of ELIXIR, an intergovernmental organization that coordinates and develops life sciences resources across Europe. Having accepted, she will be one of the select group of 14 members that make up the ELIXIR SAB as a specialist in the area of Population Genetics.

ELIXIR brings together scientists from more than 240 research institutes in 21 member countries, three observer countries, and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK. The main objective of this organization is to enable researchers to more easily access and analyze the huge amounts of data produced in the life sciences, exchange specialized knowledge and apply best practices in order to obtain new insights into how living organisms function in health and disease and improve the impact of research in this area.

The SAB is tasked with “providing high-level reviews of the scientific and technical functioning of ELIXIR, including reviewing applications and assessing the implementation of the ELIXIR Scientific Programme and the activities of the ELIXIR Platforms and Communities.” This invitation to join the ELIXIR SAB, explains Luísa Pereira, “represents an important international recognition of my career. It will be my first experience influencing the direction of research and innovation at European level”.

The i3S researcher, who frequently works with researchers from African countries, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia, Central and South America, guarantees that she will do everything to “improve equity in genomic characterization worldwide”.

For the i3S, Luísa Pereira highlights, “the fact that one of its vice-directors participates in ELIXIR SAB reinforces the institutional reputation at the European level in the areas of big data and personalized medicine. It also provides new funding opportunities and partnerships with international leaders from academia, industry and governments”.

The list of ELIXIR data resources, the researcher says, “includes databases well known and used by the i3S community, such as Ensembl (a browser for vertebrate genomes); GWAS Catalog (a collection of genome-wide association studies); The Human Protein Atlas (“HPA” - a map of human proteins in cells, tissues, and organs); UniProt (a comprehensive resource for protein sequence and annotation data); as well as EGA and ENA files (high-throughput genomic data files)”.