The mini-symposium will take place April 1 in Washington, D.C., during the National Research Council’s Space Science Week.

The objective of the mini-symposium is to discuss issues related to the development of a database and associated portals and tools that could help in designing GeneLab—an open access database platform comprising omics data from both reference and investigator-led experiments.

Madduri, a software engineer and project manager in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne, will speak on his experiences and lessons learned in creating Globus Genomics, a next-generation sequencing analysis service. Together with other panel members Madduri will discuss the challenges faced in developing a major database project – for example, deciding the analytical tools to include, managing the movement and storage of data – and the benefits and costs of such an effort.

The mini-symposium is sponsored by the National Academies as part of the National Research Council’s spring 2015 meeting of the Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space.