Abbreviation SIB Director Prof. Ron Appel | Region Switzerland | |
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Formation March 30, 1998; 18 years ago (1998-03-30) Type academic not-for-profit foundation Headquarters SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Quartier Sorge
Batiment Genopode
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland | ||
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland.
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The institute was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinformatics resources to the national and international life science research community in fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology as well as to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. In particular, it promotes research, develops databanks and computer technologies, and is involved in teaching and service activities.
History
The institute was originally created to provide a framework for stable long-term funding for both the Swiss-Prot database and the Swiss EMBnet node. Swiss-Prot in particular went through a major funding crisis in 1996, which led the leaders of the five research groups active in bioinformatics in Geneva and Lausanne, Ron Appel, Amos Bairoch, Philipp Bucher, Victor Jongeneel and Manuel Peitsch to create SIB. Once created, the institute could then apply for funding under a Swiss law that allows the government to fund up to 50% of expenses of vital research and teaching infrastructures.
The first director of the institute was Victor Jongeneel followed by Ernest Feytmans between 2001 and September 2007. Since 1 October 2007, the institute is led by Ron Appel, one of its founding members.
Organisation
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is a federation of research groups with affiliated bioinformaticians at SIB partner institutions: the Universities of Basel, Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano and Zurich, the Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich, the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, and the Geneva School of Business Administration (HEG). Current research groups in SIB are located in Basel, Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano and Zurich.
SIB federates more than 60 research, service and infrastructure groups, gathering 650 scientists in fields as varied as proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, systems biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary bioinformatics, modelling, imaging, biophysics, population genetics and clinical bioinformatics. The SIB organizes an annual international scientific meeting, the [BC]2 Basel Computational Biology Conference.
Education and training
One of SIB’s priorities is to promote and coordinate education in bioinformatics. SIB members are directly, or indirectly, involved in a number of bioinformatics courses at all educational levels – from high school to undergraduate and graduate degrees – as well as in specialized training for life scientists. SIB also promotes a PhD Training Network in bioinformatics, which is open to graduate students at Swiss schools of higher education. The objectives of this network are two-fold:
- To offer graduate students in bioinformatics a set of cutting-edge courses that provide both the theoretical and the practical knowledge necessary to work on a successful PhD research project in bioinformatics.
- To foster the development of a network of PhD students and promote the exchange of ideas, as well as the mobility of the students between participating institutions.
Popular science
SIB is also involved in bringing bioinformatics to the layman. Understanding the growing importance this relatively recent science has in today’s society is becoming fundamental. Indeed, in not too distant a future, patients will be referring to results directly generated by bioinformatics methods. Since the year 2000, in order to heighten public awareness, SIB has taken part in numerous science fairs, created two online magazines, an outdoor exhibition and, in 2012, a virtual exhibition.