Accessible Innovation

Collaboration is hard in the best of times. Throw in incompatible goals and objectives, and it is downright impossible. Significantly improving how research and innovation get done requires many adjustments to its complicated and interconnected system. One part of this system can rarely make a change independently; to make an effective change, many organizations, processes, organizations, and people must also accommodate and adapt to this change. When all of these actors have clear and complementary incentives to adopt and add to a change, the result can be magical.

WANTED: PID for an object that is not too big and not too small. One that provides just the information that I seek, and is in a language that I can understand. Not too old. Accompanied by data and resources. Available in my country. Open access only need apply. What would a PID be without its accompanying metadata? Rich data help fulfill the FAIR promises by making information more easily findable, and by providing clarity on the constraints around being accessible (how?

Who do we include in the planning of how we use genomic data to improve human health? Last week I participated in and gave a keynote address at the 8th plenary meetings for the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (GA4GH). GA4GH plays a critical role in enabling responsible genomic data sharing within a human rights framework. This work includes framing policy and setting standards that meet the real-world needs of the international genomics community.

Genomics data offers enormous hope of tackling our world’s toughest health challenges. But we can’t successfully carry out our critical work of defining technical and ethical standards for genomics data without first building a diverse “intentional community” committed to inclusivity. At the GA4GH 8th Plenary I was invited to give a keynote talk about this topic. listen time: 30 min. KEYNOTE: GA4GH 8th Plenary Building an Intentional Community for Standards Development

“People don’t feel connected to your community because they joined a big crowd in an arena. They feel connected because of the individual conversations, private moments, and vulnerability that they experience with other participants.” - Charles Vogl Unconferences build community through specific characteristics: its collaborative conference agenda creation, “vote with your feet” model of participation, and dynamic pace. These components are difficult to recreate in a virtual setting.

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail… until you get a paintbrush. Every so often you get the gift of being able to see the world through a new lens. In my adult life, there are several distinct times when I was acutely aware of picking up a new tool, shifting to a new lens. Engineering: The object lens The first was when I was an undergraduate studying engineering.

Broad diversity in the community that makes standards and policies ensures that the standards will work for all that we seek to include. Yes, gender and race diversity, but also region, industry, background, viewpoint, and approach. And when we’re talking about standards for genomics data sharing, that diversity is essential for inclusion of information that can benefit the entirety of human-kind. It was so much fun to be interviewed for the the OmicsXchange podcast this month in my role as the chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health Equity, Diversity and Inclusion group.

Getting a PhD is a lot of work. In fact, if you believe the Princeton Review, maybe no one should pursue them at all. And yet, I have worked with enough people who hold PhDs that it got me wondering about the statistics of PhDs and research. Usually, the people who pursue PhDs really love learning, and are excited about the prospect of making a profession of it. Much of the time, pursuing research is an important component of this learning journey.

Over the past two days I have been looking over product and start-up pitches in my role as one of the judges of this year’s Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition at Stevens Institute of Technology. Each year undergraduate students turn their undergraduate engineering and business Senior Design Projects into business plans, and prepare elevator pitches to compete for prizes that total $17,500. I have been spending my evenings reading executive summaries and listening to the (video recorded) pitches while providing feedback and asking questions about their business ideas and product approaches.

This week has been hard. A lot of the daily professional discussions I have are related to how research and data are shared more effectively and efficiently. This week I was even in a full-day meeting discussing how we might help accelerate how insights from clinical data are shared. As one might expect, examples naturally gravitated to the current crisis and COVID-19 research, response, and treatments. But my mind was elsewhere…