Objective
The principal strategic objective of INTERCROSSING is the cultivation of a new type of young researcher to deal with challenges of exploiting the latest Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies – individuals with rigorous training in three disciplines hardly ever found together any one young scientist: population genetics, informatics and statistics. The need for this supra-disciplinary combination of skills reflects the extraordinary new demands produced by technologies that allow us to sequence whole genomes, and to quantify their regulation and expression in many samples from the same species in multiple locations. This torrent of data overwhelms current computational, genetic and statistical approaches for distinguishing the biologically relevant patterns from the background noise.
The consortium behind INTERCROSSING – including five universities and seven SMEs spanning nine EU countries – are all using the NGS technologies, but have found the recruitment of appropriate Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) a major obstacle to building on their innovations. This fundamental shortage in the EU research community is slowing the scientific and industrial exploitation of these groundbreaking new data streams; the shortage of key talent occurs worldwide, and has attracted major investment in other regions (e.g. at the Beijing Genome Institute).
A combination of industrial and academic partners will deliver training courses equipping the ESRs to traverse the barriers between these disciplines. Taught courses will provide practical experience of NGS data acquisition, computational methods, model-based statistical inference and population genetics. These skills will allow the ESRs to implement state-of-the art methods to the new data. The ESRs will also be trained in a suit of research skills to deploy this understanding across the industrial and academic sectors, and will be employed in a project in which they move between the sectors.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2011-ITN
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Funding Scheme
MC-ITN - Networks for Initial Training (ITN)Coordinator
E1 4NS London
United Kingdom