Our librarians constantly seek to expand their knowledge in order to provide the highest quality service to our patrons. One method by which this is accomplished is through seeking professional development in the form of conferences and other educational opportunities. Recently Arian Abdulla, PhD. (Biomedical Science Librarian), completed the Genomic Access Course and shared insights about his experience. If you would like further information about Arian's experience, please email him: aa4gh@virginia.edu

Arian Abdullah, Biomedical Science Librarian

 

Which institution organized this conference?

The Course took place at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. The curriculum of the Genome Access Course was developed in conjunction with staff at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute.
 

What were your three major takeaways from the conference?

  • Bioinformatics is expanding rapidly and, with increasing amounts of data, there are many tools available to analyze and makes sense of the data.
  • Technology is playing a major role in research. Now there are many next-generation sequencing technologies that focus on the characterization of individual cells (i.e Single Cell RNA- Sequencing).
  • Engaging with other researchers and learn ing more about how they will use some of the technologies in their work was enlightening for my work here at UVA.


How you will apply these takeaways to your work with Health Sciences Library patrons?

Bioinformatics and genomics tools are being widely-utilized by researchers; being familiar with these tools will help me to better serve our biomedical scientists, whether through one-on-one consultations or by developing workshops related to this topic. I plan to lead two workshops this Fall, both of which will focus on resources available via NCBI.
 

What other conferences will you attend in the coming year? How do you anticipate that those experiences will inform your work?

Next year I plan to attend the Medical Library Association annual conference. I am curious to learn more about the work of colleagues at other institutions, as well as hear about the opportunities and challenges that they face at their institutions.