We are pleased to welcome Steven Newhouse, founding director of the European Grid Infrastructure, as our new Head of Technical Services.

As founding director of EGI.eu, the coordinating body of European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), until October 2013, Steven led the implementation, deployment and operation of a grid infrastructure to support the needs of different user communities. He now joins EMBL-EBI as Head of Technical Services, addressing the needs of EMBL-EBI users within the institute and globally.

“I am very happy to be making a contribution to the life sciences, which have become very data intensive, and using the skills I’ve been building over the past five years,” he says. “The EBI has a very different technical environment from the EGI: it caters for one discipline, which simplifies things in some ways, but there is still a lot of technical diversity within that tight research area.”

Since taking his degree in aeronautical engineering at Imperial College London, Steven has worked in both public and private sectors: the University of Southampton, Microsoft, standards bodies such as the Open Grid Forum, and European Grid activities at CERN and through the EGI in Amsterdam. In his new position at EMBL-EBI he will be developing a strategy to convert the diverse needs of the institute’s users into solid technical solutions.

“EMBL-EBI’s data centres provide a wonderful foundation to meet its mission now – but that mission is evolving. I am really looking forward to expanding our collaborations with EIROFORUM members, and seeing how the rich fabric of technical capacity within ELIXIR and its national nodes starts to underpin technical developments in the life sciences,” says Steven. “That goes for cloud technologies and other ways we are handling big data. The EBI has a long tradition of strong collaborations, and I am pleased to be a part of expanding those partnerships in the future.”

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