Discovery Co-Lead Nominations

About the team

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) (https://www.ga4gh.org) is a global standards development organisation dedicated to realizing the potential of genomics in health. Supported by GA4GH staff across four Host Institutions (Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, Broad Institute, Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute), members of the genomics community provide expert leadership to GA4GH’s Work Streams. These include the Discovery Work Stream, which creates APIs and protocols — such as the Beacon API and the Service Registry specification – to make it easier to find and use data, tools, and infrastructure for genomics and clinical analysis, in close alignment with other GA4GH products

We would like to invite expressions of interest in the volunteer role of Discovery Co-lead.

Your role

This is an opportunity to be at the heart of GA4GH’s product development and integration work. Working closely with your Co-Lead and members of the GA4GH staff, the Discovery Co-Lead will contribute to the leadership and direction of the Discovery Work Stream, in line with GA4GH’s institutional direction and goals. This involves developing the Discovery strategy, identifying work that can be taken forward by the group, chairing calls, leading and listening to the community as it works through technical issues, and building consensus. As Discovery engages with groups from across GA4GH and the world, considerable liaison work will be involved along with the need to engage with other teams both within GA4GH and externally.

Why join us

GA4GH accelerates progress in human health by building tools that expand responsible, effective, and democratised use of genomic and clinical data. With a global volunteer community made up of hundreds of individuals from a variety of organisations and institutions, GA4GH provides an active environment in which to drive these aims forward while building on our foundational commitments to human rights, ethics, and security.

Having a truly global and diverse community of contributors and leadership is key to GA4GH’s work. We are actively pursuing strategies to increase participation through our engagement and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) work. We are committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all contributors at all levels and welcome expressions of interest from all interested individuals.

You have:

• Substantial experience in bioinformatics, genomics, clinical informatics, or related disciplines;
• Knowledge of data standards used in healthcare such as HPO, HL7 (v2 and FHIR), OMOP, ICD, SNOMED, etc;
• Experience working with biomedical research data or clinical groups using genomics and related data;
• Familiarity with data management  platforms;
• A good understanding of data protection scenarios and components;
• The ability to work effectively with and provide leadership to a broad range of people from multiple disciplines and cultures;
• A demonstrable ability to work collaboratively, explore multiple points of view, and build consensus;
• The capacity to identify opportunities aligned with the group’s goals and translate these into actionable plans.

You might also have experience in: 

• working with GA4GH or other standards development organizations;
• working as part of a volunteer community;
• working with a custodian of genomic data;
• working on or with a project for sharing genomic data between organizations;
• data modeling and harmonization, ontologies, terminologies, and codesets.