The Consolidation Course of the first edition of the BioData.pt | ELIXIR Portugal Training Data Stewards for Life Sciences Program took place from the 15th to the 17th of November, 2022, at the Collaborative Center of Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, in Oeiras, with the purpose of training the first generation of Data Stewards for the life sciences to support the implementation of data management, open science and FAIR data principles in Portuguese Research & Innovation institutions. The course was lectured by Daniel Faria (INESC-ID/Instituto Superior Técnico/BioData.pt), Stephan Nylinder and Wolmar Nyberg Åkerström (NBIS/ELIXIR Sweden), and attended by 15 researchers from 13 Portuguese R&I organizations.
This 3-days hands-on course for knowledge consolidation focused on a deeper look at the stages of the data life cycle using the RDMkit - the Research Data Management toolkit for Life Sciences developed by ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for biological data, and counted with practical exercises and in-depth discussions by the participants, based on the acquired experience during the overall program.
It was the last step of an innovative Training Program that unfolded from February to November 2022, and was designed by BioData.pt | ELIXIR Portugal with the collaboration of FCCN (the Scientific Computing Unit of the FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), ELIXIR Netherlands, and NBIS – National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (ELIXIR Sweden), under the frame of ELIXIR Converge, a European Commission funded project intended to help standardize life science data management across Europe.
We are proud of this first cohort of Data Stewards for the Life Sciences, who is committed to supporting the implementation of data management best practices in their R&I institutions to make research more effective and usable for the benefit of society.