This blog was put together by Rebecca Nicholl, Senior Marketing Manager for the training team at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, supported by the personal archives and stories from our emeritus Head of Training, Cath Brooksbank.

It’s easy to look ahead in science; what is to come, what is new, and what excitement lies ahead. But we should also take time to look back and reflect on our history, where we came from, and how the foundations of open science and training at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) were laid.

In September 1994, EMBL-EBI was firmly established in the UK. Here’s the timeline of training at EMBL-EBI.

2002: the start of on-site training

In 2002, the institute extended its first building, and in it, a bespoke training room known as the Garden Room was built. Featuring modern in-desk computers and breakout space for coffee and networking, the essence of on-site training was born. The training and outreach were overseen from the start by our recent emeritus Head of Training, Cath Brooksbank.

2003: introducing the off-site programme

Ensembl (a public and open project providing access to genomes, annotations, tools and methods at EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute) ran the first off-site workshop as part of the Wellcome Trust’s Open Door Series in 2003, shaping what was to become the EMBL-EBI Training off-site programme. Other service-specific roadshows followed in 2005.

2004: team expansion
Cath soon realised she couldn’t plan and deliver the scientific programme alone, and so in 2004, our first Scientific Training Officer joined the team to work alongside Cath, the Industry Programme team members and the Events Organiser we shared.

2006: our first experiment into online learning

Alongside the Industry Programme, we answered the community call for on-demand training and started to experiment with e-learning. Little did we know how huge this would become for the training programme twenty years later.

2007: hands-on training arrives on campus

A growing team of trainers, event organisers, and IT professionals led to the creation of the core programme of hands-on training. 2007 marks the official launch of EMBL-EBI Training in its recognisable form.

2009: the start of ELIXIR

EMBL-EBI Training has been a fundamental part of ELIXIR (Europe’s distributed research infrastructure for life science data) since its inception. Planning phases, funding calls, and knowledge exchange are still at the heart of the UK node.

2011: e-learning returns

Strengthened and renewed by interest from our community, we once again forayed into the world of self-paced online learning. From the beginning, we ensured that all training materials are open access under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

2012: Train the Trainer (TtT) goes international

Our successful workshops, where we train the trainers of the future, saw massive interest and expansion in Australia. Their programme of TtT still runs to this day, and our partnerships around Australia are still as strong as ever.

2014: new training facilities and campus expansion

EMBL-EBI and the training programme continued to grow. So much so, that in 2014 we moved into our new building, with two bespoke training rooms dedicated to training. The Industry Programme gave the Garden Room training suite a new lease of life for its own programme of events.

2015: webinars transform the training programme

It’s hard to imagine our programme without the essential webinars. The first webinar series was launched in 2015 and has been running ever since. We run free weekly webinars throughout the year, and two themed webinar series each year on top of that. Recent series have included spatial transcriptomics and an in-depth guide to using the AlphaFold database.

2017 – 2022: capacity strengthening and pandemic-led adaptation

The six-year period that followed can be summarised by two C’s. CABANA and COVID. Under Cath’s leadership, our hugely successful capacity-strengthening model highlighted the need for equitable bioinformatics across the globe, and the CABANA project was launched.

On the flip side, none of us could have foreseen the COVID-19 pandemic. What could have been a closure of the training programme instead brought the opportunity to reach a more global audience, as we pivoted to delivering our bioinformatics training courses virtually.

Since 2020, we’ve run courses either in-person or virtually using virtual machines, Slack, and Zoom to run the course and networking between our participants and have managed to deliver our training to a much more global audience as a result of this pivot.

2022 – present: becoming more equitable and accessible across the world

The pandemic taught us that making our training more accessible is the direction we want to be heading in as a team. We have grown our on-demand training to an incredible 400+ pieces of open source online content, introduced travel grants and fee waivers to ensure our live training is more easily accessed for more people, and continue to build on capacity strengthening across the world through our grants and partnerships such as CABANAnet and BiotrAIn.

What does the future hold?

Our team and training programme have flourished under Cath Brooksbank’s leadership. We wish her good luck as she embarks upon her well-deserved retirement this year, and say thank you for the team and legacy she leaves behind.

Looking ahead to the future, we’re excited to see what modern challenges and opportunities bring to the world of bioinformatics training. From AI-led innovations to ecological and planetary challenges, we know we will keep delivering world-class training in the data-driven life sciences for the global audience.

Discover more from EMBL-EBI Training at www.ebi.ac.uk/training