Open House for HEAL Data: Discussions With HEAL-Recommended Repositories

The NIH HEAL Initiative^® aims to create a novel web platform connecting data from existing repositories to allow researchers to share, find, and analyze data, with the goal of collaboratively accelerating scientific discovery and developing solutions to address the national opioid and pain management public health crises. The more than 600 awards involved in the initiative are producing data at rapid rates, and identifying the right repository to house HEAL data is essential for researchers to share, discover, and develop solutions to urgently put an end to these interconnected crises and save lives.

In this webinar, Alex Waldrop of the HEAL Data Stewardship Group will lead a panel discussion plus Q&A featuring three participating repositories in the HEAL Data Ecosystem: Vivli, NIMH, and Figshare. 

Waldrop will also share resources newly developed since last year’s Finding a Home for Your HEAL Data webinar, including an updated repository selection quiz, a curated list of recommended repositories, and an explanation of how choosing a repository intersects with preparing study-level metadata for the HEAL Platform.

Dr. Alex Waldrop is a senior bioinformatics and machine learning scientist in the Genomics, Bioinformatics, and Translational Research Center at RTI International. He also serves as the Data Engagement Lead for the HEAL Data Stewardship Group. A computer scientist by training with a Ph.D. in bioinformatics and more than 10 years of experience in big data analytics, his work focuses on leveraging the power of machine learning to solve real-world problems across the biological, environmental, and social science domains. His scientific background includes various applications of high-throughput sequencing data to biological systems, including projects in microbiomics, population genetics, cancer genomics, transcriptomics, and statistical behavioral genetics. His computational background has focused largely on leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to improve data findability and harmonization through the development of tools like Dug, a semantic search engine for biomedical datasets developed for NHLBI’s BioData Catalyst platform.

Dr. Ana Van Gulick is the Government and Funder Lead and Head of Data Review at the research repository, Figshare. Dr. Van Gulick received a Ph.D. in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience from Vanderbilt University in 2014 and has worked on data management, data sharing, and open science practices and infrastructure for the past 8 years, including previously as faculty at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries leading their Open Science Program and within the neuroscience research community. She joined Figshare in 2020 where she manages repository projects for U.S. federal agencies and public and private research funders, including NIH, and leads Figshare's Data Curation Service supporting FAIR data and the Figshare+ repository for large datasets. She is based in Seattle and enjoys helping researchers across scientific disciplines make their research more open and impactful. 

Julie Wood is the Senior Director at Vivli. She is responsible for Operations, including supporting members’ and researchers’ data archiving, access, and analysis on the Vivli platform. She is also a Co-Chair of the NIH Generalist Repositories Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) Coopetition Working Group. Prior to joining Vivli, Ms. Wood served as the Head of Communications and External Affairs at the Cochrane Collaboration and the Director of Corporate Communications at Oxfam GB in addition to working for a Microsoft partner.  

Dr. Rebecca Li is the Executive Director of Vivli and on faculty at the Center for Bioethics at the Harvard Medical School. Previous to her current role, she was the Executive Director of the MRCT Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard for more than 5 years and remains a Senior Advisor at the Center. She has more than 25 years of experience spanning the entire drug development process with experience in Biotech, Pharma, and CRO environments. She completed a Fellowship in 2013 in the Division of Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Daniel Janes is a Program Lead for the NIMH Data Archive at the National Institute of Mental Health. Prior to moving to NIMH in November 2021, he managed the NIGMS portfolio on population genetics and evolution as well as K99 postdoctoral awards and the MIDAS modeling network. Dr. Janes earned his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida.

Julie Hayes at [email protected]  

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