The purpose of an ERCIM working group is to build and maintain a network of ERCIM researchers in a particular scientific field. Membership to the working groups is open to Researchers affiliated to ERCIM member Institutes, as well as non-ERCIM organisations. Their main activities are the organisation of workshops and the preparation of common project proposals. The workshops organized by the working groups are open to any researcher in the specific scientific field. The working groups are also the focus of internal mobility within ERCIM.
In this direction, the ERCIM Working Group on Biomedical Informatics intents to promote interactions and collaborations between the various R&D groups of ERCIM member institutions active in the relevant thematic fields, to facilitate cross fertilization and synergies between distant scientific disciplines and thus to consolidate and advance this new scientific and research field enabling knowledge empowered individualized health care in the post-genomic era.
Emphasis is on the development of predictive models for diseases which are linked to genetic and environmental risk factors so that appropriate preventive measures can be taken and progress monitored pro-actively on an on-going basis, and on understanding the link between genes, disease and the environment. Researchers in the following fields could be interested and included in the activities of the WG:
- integration and analysis of genetic and medical information for health applications
- biomedical ontologies
- gene expression analysis (computational and experimental)
- genetic imaging
- modeling of genetic disorders and diseases
- Grid-Based approaches to molecular-biomedical applications
- data mining and visualization of biomedical data
- computational methods and tools to support individualized medicine
Furthermore the BioMedical Informatics Working Group aims to promote awareness about promising basic and applied research results and their potential industrial adoption, to promote relevant standards and foster mobility of ERCIM researchers.