Workflows Community of Practice
Introduction
The Workflows Community of Practice aims to build a long-lasting local community of developers of pipelines, associated tools and informatics infrastructure, as well as Nextflow users.
“As bioinformatics continues to evolve quickly we recognise how essential communities, such as this one, are,” said John Boyle, Associate Director of Science Solutions at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. “This community provides the means for us to share and advance knowledge with our peers. It also provides a forum for us to understand best practice, so that we can improve how we use workflow tools to rapidly put together state of the art analysis pipelines, which are required for us to undertake cutting edge science.”
Core team
The core team members are responsible for organising events, and other community outreach efforts.
Priyanka Surana facilitates the workflows community and is passionate about building networks that support peer learning. In her day job, she is a Senior Bioinformatician at Wellcome Sanger Institute, overseeing development of workflows to decode the biodiversity on the islands of Britain and Ireland through genomics. She holds a PhD in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology with a minor in Statistics from the Iowa State University, USA. Before joining Sanger in 2021, Priyanka worked at the University of Sydney in Australia. She focused on developing scalable bioinformatics pipelines and building community relationships. This involved establishing connections with other national bioinformatics organizations to build an ecosystem of platforms providing researchers with sophisticated data analysis and digital asset stewardship capabilities. It was through this work that Priyanka became involved with the Nextflow project.
Likhitha Surapaneni works at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EBML-EBI) as a Bioinformatics Developer in the Genome Interpretation team, which focuses on providing fundamental reference resources that underpin genomic research.
Damon-Lee Pointon is a bioinformatician working in the Assembly team within the Tree of Life programme at Wellcome Sanger Institute. His day-to-day role includes building and running, the nextflow pipeline, TreeVal. This large pipeline generates suplemental data for the curation of high quality reference genomes. He holds both a BSc (Hons) Microbiology from Nottingham Trent University and a BSc (Hons) Data Science (Bioinformatics). Prior to joining Sanger in 2019 as an apprentice, he has worked as a Microbiologist and Science Tutor.
Antonio Marinho is a Senior Bioinformatician in the Genomic Surveillance Unit at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Simon Murray is a Bioinformatician working for the Cellular Genetics Informatics team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. His major responsibilities involve developing high throughput pipelines to deal with a variety of different sequencing protocols including scRNAseq, scATACseq, CITEseq, Smartseq2 and bulk RNAseq. These pipelines have a variety of functions including alignment, artefact removal, donor deconvolution and quality control. He has a BSc (Hons) Data Science (Bioinformatics) from Anglia Ruskin University which he obtained whilst completing his apprenticeship at Sanger.
Organisations
EMBL-EBI is international, innovative and interdisciplinary, and a champion of open data in the life sciences.
Wellcome Genome Campus is home to two leading institutes as well as innovative genomics and biodata companies, scientific facilities, and a state of the art conference centre.
Wellcome Sanger Institute is a world leader in genome research that delivers insights into human, evolutionary and pathogen biology.