ORAU proudly announces its recent award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a state-of-the-art training center as one of five major centers for the Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE).
NIH Common Fund programs generate a wide range of diverse and valuable data sets and knowledge designed to be used by the research community. The CFDE aims to facilitate improved discovery, reuse, integration, and analyses of these datasets to form novel hypothesis for accelerating discoveries in biomedical research.
However, these data and knowledge reside in different locations, and it can be challenging to work with multiple digital resources in an accessible and user-friendly way. To help remedy this, the CFDE is creating a cloud-based online discovery portal to help make Common Fund data sets findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR), and to enable researchers to research across Common Fund data sets to ask scientific and clinical questions from a single access point.
The CFDE Training Center will serve as the central hub for training development, coordination and evaluation across CFDE programs and initiatives.
“This award will allow ORAU to meaningfully contribute to the NIH CFDE program goals and objectives through the establishment of the Training Center,” said Jim Sears, ORAU senior vice president. “The training center will enable users to use and query across multiple Common Fund data sets, increase awareness of, access to, and train users to work in the cloud.”
The training center will be responsible for identifying and addressing the training needs of the CFDE community. To do this, the training center will develop new opportunities to address gaps in the training landscape. The training center will also establish a mentorship program to support the growing community of Common Fund data users. Finally, the training center will interact with other components of the CFDE to develop and maintain training-related content for all CFDE users.
Allissa Dillman, Ph.D., co-principal investigator and owner of BioData Sage LLC, brings her extensive expertise in biomedical data science to the project. ORAU has an established working relationship with Dillman with over two years of experience collaborating on data training and engagement learning opportunities.
Those interested in collaboration or future Training Center activities can contact program staff at cfde-trainingcenter@orau.org.
Other Transaction Award (OTA): OT2OD037922