Coordination of Research

CUB coordinates bioinformatics activities in research projects through the construction of a collaborative network following two converging strategies. In a bottom-up approach, this construction is initiated from the identification of needs in biology research teams. In a top-down approach, the network is structured via the integration of bioinformaticians in biology research teams.

Cooperation of CUB members ranges from occasional discussions to co-funded interdisciplinary projects with research groups or core facilities. It may entail sharing staff, e.g., co-supervised PhD student, or hosting staff, e.g., embedded bioinformaticians. An embedded bioinformatician (or e-bioinformatician) is attached to a lab and formally related to one of the SIB groups. His/her work is either fully dedicated to support the research projects in the lab or it is shared with a SIB group in one or more projects. The e-bioinformatician interacts with the research group leader for the biological/experimental issues and to the SIB group leader for bioinformatics and computational issues.

In the long run, CUB should become a partner of choice for bioinformatics R&D in biology or biomedical research projects supported by Swiss or international institutions. For example, several CUB members are also members of the Institute of Genetics and Genomics of Geneva (IGe3). IGe3 spans a wide spectrum of expertise from medical sciences to modal organisms and biodiversity and the ethical, social, legal and financial aspects of the genomics research of which bioinformatics is an essential component. Research topics will also be guided by specific calls or emerging initiatives (e.g., for high performance computing or supercomputing and modelling environment such as CADMOS).