Speaker
Anita Bandrowski, PhD
Anita Bandrowski, PhD, trained as a bench neurophysiologist, working to elucidate physiological mechanisms of learning and epilepsy. However, soon after postdoc, Bandrowski began to work in data, starting with the annotation of the human genome for Celera Inc. She moved to neuroinformatics with the award of the Neuroscience Information Framework by the NIH's Blueprint for Neuroscience. The goal of this project was to create a comprehensive list of databases for neuroscience and to federate search across as many of these databases as possible. The framework grew to the most comprehensive search system for neuroscience data on the web. This broad overview of the data landscape highlighted the need to align and structure data and dearth of reagent information, especially how reagents and tools are cited in the scientific literature.
To address reagent underreporting issues, Bandrowski serves as the lead for the Research Resource Identification, RRID, Initiative, a group dedicated to transforming scholarly communication, which has recently become a non-profit organization. RRIDs are unique identifiers for Key Biological Resources, aggregated by our group from community databases and requested from authors in participating journals.
