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The Wellcome Trust to sponsor Collaborations Workshop 2021

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The Wellcome Trust to sponsor Collaborations Workshop 2021

Author(s)
Rachael Ainsworth

Rachael Ainsworth

SSI fellow

Yo Yehudi

Yo Yehudi

SSI fellow

Posted on 26 March 2021

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The Wellcome Trust to sponsor Collaborations Workshop 2021

Posted by j.laird on 26 March 2021 - 9:30am 

Wellcome Trust logoWe are excited to announce that The Wellcome Trust are Platinum Sponsors of Collaborations Workshop 2021 (CW21), taking place online from Tuesday 30 March to Thursday 1 April.

Wellcome is a politically and financially independent global charitable foundation that supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. The foundation supports discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and is taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, global heating and infectious diseases through grant funding, advocacy campaigns and partnerships.

Data for Science & Health

Open source software powers incredible scientific and research discoveries, from images of the black hole in 2019 to visualising proteins in 3D virtual reality. Open source hardware can also affordably save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, the academic credit and metric system does not incentivise or reward activities around code sharing, instead preferring to use research papers and citations for structured reward and promotion systems. Furthermore, there is a lack of trust in how health data and technologies are built, used and governed; there is little funding for the foundational tools needed for health data science to thrive globally; and there are few opportunities to employ the talents of data scientists and research software engineers to solve health challenges.

Wellcome has dedicated £75 million over the next five years towards making trustworthy data science a first-class citizen in the research ecosystem as part of Data for Science and Health. The programme aims to incentivise the foundational tools, trust, and talent required to recognise and fund open research software sustainably by:

  • Funding open source, foundational data and software tools for science and health, with a focus on usability, adoption and long-term sustainability, to make it easier and more equitable for data scientists globally to innovate with health data. 
  • Demonstrating what trustworthy health data science means in practice through its projects and partnerships, and share what is learned openly to influence the field as it develops.
  • Strengthening communities of health data innovators internationally. 
  • Understanding barriers to data science careers in health and tackling them by changing research culture.
  • Encouraging and rewarding non-traditional research outputs and career paths, such as open data sharing and re-usable code.

If you are attending CW21 and would like to learn more or discuss ideas for transformational research technology that affects healthcare, funding mental health, global heating and infectious diseases (or foundational ideas that would affect all three), you can talk to SSI Fellow Yo Yehudi, the Open Source Technical Lead within the Data for Science and Health team, at the Wellcome Sponsor Booth during the breaks.

About Collaborations Workshop 2021

We thank the Wellcome Trust for their kind and generous support as Platinum Sponsors of CW21. To find out more information, view the agenda and to register please visit the CW21 website

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