Flaminia Zane joined EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute as a Scientific Training Officer for digital learning in the training team in February. Get to know Flaminia in our blog post.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your background before joining EMBL-EBI’s training team.
One thing I often say when people ask about me is that I struggle to put a label on myself. If I had to choose one, I’d say I’m a generalist: I find everything so interconnected that I feel a constant pull to explore as much as I can! I studied classics in high school, and then I decided to switch to science (molecular biology) at University. Then I started learning bioinformatics, and as a result, I worked both at the bench and in bioinformatics for my PhD. It was during my PhD that I felt the lab wasn’t enough, and got involved in scientific outreach workshops for high school students, as well as organising events for young researchers in life science. 

What attracted you to the role of Scientific Training Officer for digital learning?
There is a strong editorial side to this job, and I love it. I work closely with Ajay and other team members to plan, curate, and put into place EMBL-EBI on-demand training. To keep our catalogues up to date, we constantly ask ourselves this question: what is most relevant and needed for students and researchers in life science today? All our work on the e-learning section comes from this starting point.

What are some of the events/projects you’ve been working on since joining?
I have been supporting a variety of events/projects in the past six months, including my first face-to-face course at EMBL-EBI, ‘Data science for life scientists’. It is an introductory course in data science for biologists just starting in the field: we had a wonderful cohort of trainers and attendees, and I am looking forward to next year’s iteration.

I have also supported colleagues at EMBL-EBI in writing an online tutorial for the ‘Pathogens Portal’ database, which was launched in 2023.

Another highlight for me was the webinar series ‘How to organise and share my imaging data?’. All the webinars were led by great speakers, and as someone who has never extensively worked with imaging data, I felt I was on both the coordinating and learning side.

Are you attending any conferences or workshops of interest soon?
I am trying to keep up-to-date on all EMBL events, as it’s a reservoir of knowledge and opportunities. For instance, in July, I will attend the “Communicating complexity: how to explain complex ideas in simple words” led by EMBL communications editor, Shreya Ghosh. In training as in communication, we often have to make complex concepts as simple as possible, without being simplistic. It’s not always easy!

Finally, what are you most looking forward to working on in the next 12 months?
I am currently working in collaboration with Loïc Lannelongue (University of Cambridge) and other colleagues at EMBL-EBI on the creation of training content on the environmental impact of bioinformatics. Bioinformatics often feels cost-free compared to wet-lab research, but it’s not the case (and won’t be in the near future as AI use becomes second nature for all of us). We hope this will support students, researchers and bioinformaticians in what they could do to make their work as less environmentally impactful as possible, without compromising research quality. We aim for our training material to be published by the end of the year, and I am looking forward to it.