FREE BIOINFORMATICS WORKSHOP CONCLUDES
UP, London school collaborate for the week-long One Health Omics workshop
THE University of the Philippines Mindanao (UPMin), in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), UK, has successfully completed the One Health Omics Project, a week-long free online bioinformatics workshop from October 11-16, 2021.
Out of 124 applicants, only 40 were shortlisted to participate in the workshop composed of faculty members, clinicians, and researchers from different regions in Mindanao.
In the opening ceremony, Dr. Aleyla De Cadiz, project leader of One Health Omics, said that the workshop serves to capacitate Filipino researchers in Mindanao on omics technology in the surveillance, management, and control of infections in a One Health setting.
“We want to expose Mindanaoan researchers to bioinformatics tools and techniques which can be helpful in their research focus and future research endeavors in the region,” she added.
The bioinformatics workshop was facilitated by Dr. Jody Phelan, Julian Libiseller-Egger, Daniel Ward, Anton Spadar, and Paula Josefina Gómez González, bioinformatics experts from LSHTM, all members of Professor Taane Clark’s team.
Dr. Phelan, one of the lead trainers, expressed his willingness to help and assist the participants beyond the workshop activity. He encouraged the young Filipino researchers to keep on doing the materials in their own time. Dr Phelan also looks forward to conducting face-to-face training soon. “I would love to meet everyone face-to-face so let us hope that the situation improves and that we can travel”.
The workshop proved to be very challenging to the participants given that bioinformatics is a new learning field in health research, but they were grateful to have been introduced to its concepts and applications.
“The workshop gave us the technical experience and knowledge in handling datasets in different omics approaches. This will be very useful to a researcher like me who is interested in doing omics approach studies,” said Vanessa Joy Diamante, a researcher at the Philippine Genome Center (PGC) Mindanao.
Joseph Mari Querequincia, a registered pharmacist and faculty of San Pedro College Davao said he was grateful to have been included in this training course. “The workshop allowed me to warrant a skill for Bioinformatics in which I could utilize for future academic and research undertakings related to pharmacogenomics and drug discovery”, said Querequincia.
Meanwhile, Dr. Jonah Adtoon, an Internal Medicine Specialist at the Department of Health (DOH) 11, declared her willingness to be involved in more clinical research projects in the omics field for disease investigation and patient management.
Professor of Genomics and Global Health in LSHTM and the lead United Kingdom (UK) coordinator, Prof. Taane Clark said that the skills learnt during the workshop will allow the participants to apply big data methods to genomics questions and investigations. /