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Blog from April, 2017
Pediatric cancers are the leading cause of disease-related death in children, but are defined as a rare disease when contrasted to adult tumors. Because of this classification, pediatric cancer discovery efforts are challenging due to a more limited basic and translational data-driven research infrastructure. As such, harnessing the potential for accelerated discovery through large-scale molecular/genomic data-generation and analysis platforms requires new approaches and tools for collaborative discovery on behalf of the rare disease patient-community. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and its partnered consortia-based institutions have piloted a series of data-focused initiatives which span biospecimen-driven pediatric cancer research, clinical trials, data storage, analysis, and visualization platform-development. Covered in the presentation will be our experiences over the past five years in these efforts and the partnered development of CAVATICA, a data analysis platform designed to both facilitate the rapid integration and analysis of genomic data from multiple diseases affecting children and enable transdisciplinary discovery via interoperability with the Genomic Data Commons and other NIH data repositories. 
SYNOPSIS:
BIO:
Adam Resnick, Ph.D., is the Director of Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). His research is focused on defining the cell signaling mechanisms of oncogenesis and tumor progression in brain tumors. Resnick’s research lab studies cell signaling cascades and their alterations in pediatric brain tumors to elucidate the molecular and genetic underpinnings of each tumor in an effort to identify and develop targeted therapies. Dr. Resnick serves as Scientific Chair for several consortia-based efforts, including the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) and Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC), which include more than 20 pediatric hospitals across the globe. As director of D3b, Dr. Resnick leads a multidisciplinary team to build and support a scalable, patient-focused healthcare and educational discovery ecosystem on behalf of all children.
SUMMARY:
Topic: Innovation Through Collaboration: New Models Emerging in Pediatrics for an Integrated Data-driven Healthcare Ecosystem
Speaker: Adam Resnick, Ph.D.
Date: Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Time: 11 AM – 12 PM ET
WebEx: https://cbiit.webex.com/cbiit/onstage/g.php?MTID=eb4d9b5142006405791fda136785bf8ee
Event Number: 733 632 295
Event Password: $Peakerseries17
Room: Seminar Room 110, Terrace East Level
You are invited to listen to Dr. Resnick's presentation in the NCI Shady Grove Building on Medical Center Drive or via WebEx.
Presentation: A screen cast of the presentation will be available for viewing after the event on the NCI CBIIT Speaker Series YouTube Playlist 
About the NCI CBIIT Speaker Series:
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) Speaker Series presents talks from innovators in the research and informatics communities. The biweekly presentations allow thought leaders to share their work and discuss trends across a diverse set of domains and interests. The goals of the Speaker Series are: to share leading edge research; to inform the community of new tools, trends, and ideas; to inspire innovation; and to provide a forum from which new collaborations can begin. For additional information, including past speaker series presentations, visit the CBIIT Speaker Series page.
Individuals with disabilities who need reasonable accommodation to participate in this program should contact the Office of Space and Facilities Management (OSFM) at 240-276-5900 or the Federal TTY Relay number 1-800-877-8339.
BD2K Aztec is a global biomedical resource discovery index that allows users to simultaneously search a diverse array of tools. The resources indexed include web services, standalone software, publications, and large libraries composed of many interrelated functions. Aztec will ensure that software tools remain findable in the long term by issuing persistent DOIs and routinely updating metadata for the entire index. Aztec’s established ontologies and robust API support the programmatic query of its entire database, as well as the construction of indexes for specialized subdomains. Aztec is currently in its alpha-release phase (version 1.1), in which it is being evaluated and tested by internal users at UCLA, as well as invited external users at Sage Bionetworks, TSRI, and EMBL-EBI. Their feedback and comments have been documented and incorporated into Aztec's next release. Join the conversation on Twitter, follow along with @NCI_NCIP and #CBIITSS during the presentation. 
SYNOPSIS:
BIO:
Wei Wang is the Leonard Kleinrock Chair Professor in Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles and the director of the Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi). She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1999. She was a professor in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill from 2002 to 2012, and was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center between 1999 and 2002. Dr. Wang's research interests include big data analytics, data mining, bioinformatics and computational biology, and databases. She has filed seven patents, and has published one monograph and more than one hundred seventy research papers in international journals and major peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
Dr. Wang received the IBM Invention Achievement Awards in 2000 and 2001. She was the recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2005. She was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow in 2005. She was honored with the 2007 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement at UNC. She was recognized with an IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award in 2012, an Okawa Foundation Research Award in 2013, and an ACM SIGKDD Service Award in 2016. Dr. Wang has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery in Data, Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and International Journal of Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics. She serves on the organization and program committees of international conferences including ACM SIGMOD, ACM SIGKDD, ACM BCB, VLDB, ICDE, EDBT, ACM CIKM, IEEE ICDM, SIAM DM, SSDBM, RECOMB, BIBM. She was elected to the Board of Directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Biomedical Informatics (SIGBio) in 2015.
SUMMARY:
Topic: Aztec: A Platform to Render Biomedical Software Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable
Speaker: Wei Wang
Date: Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Time: 11 AM – 12 PM ET
You are invited to listen to Dr. Wang's presentation in the NCI Shady Grove Building on Medical Center Drive or via WebEx.
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) Speaker Series presents talks from innovators in the research and informatics communities. The biweekly presentations allow thought leaders to share their work and discuss trends across a diverse set of domains and interests. The goals of the Speaker Series are: to share leading edge research; to inform the community of new tools, trends, and ideas; to inspire innovation; and to provide a forum from which new collaborations can begin. For additional information, including past speaker series presentations, visit the CBIIT Speaker Series page.
Individuals with disabilities who need reasonable accommodation to participate in this program should contact the Office of Space and Facilities Management (OSFM) at 240-276-5900 or the Federal TTY Relay number 1-800-877-8339.
