California dreamin'

You might think that only our group and team leaders are traveling the globe, but also the members of the Ensembl outreach team (Xose Fernandez, Giulietta Spudich and myself) spend a fair amount of their time on the road (or in the air ....) to spread the word about Ensembl.

I myself, for example, just returned back in the UK from a 3-week "Ensembl US West Coast tour". That means no more Margaritas, motels with ocean view or trendy LA restaurants for me for a while, but also no more lost luggage or cancelled or delayed flights (it's not all glitz and glamour .... ).

My tour started with a visit to the Plant and Animal Genome XVI Conference in San Diego, where I gave a presentation on Ensembl and spent, together with other EBI colleagues, time in the EBI booth to promote our institute. After that I gave Ensembl browser workshops at City of Hope (see picture), the University of Oregon , UCSF, UCSC (where the audience mainly consisted of genome browser folks!), and UCLA. Numbers of participants ranged from around 15 till over 50 and in all places the workshop was very enthousiastically received. In fact, several of my hosts were already asking when we could repeat this ....

The principle aim of our workshops is of course to teach people how to get the most out of Ensembl, but apart from that it also is a really good way for us to stay in contact with our users. We can see what people exactly use Ensembl for, how they use it and what they like and dislike about it, so we always return back home with lots of new ideas and suggestions. One thing that, for instance, often strikes me is that most people are not aware of the existence of our data mining tool BioMart. However, after a short explanation and some hands-on exercises they find it almost without exception very useful! So, we still have some work to do to promote this very handy tool.

By the way, we not only offer browser workshops, but also workshops on the use of the various Ensembl Perl API's. Keep an eye on this blog to see where and when the next workshops will be. Or, even better, host one at your own university or institute! For more information with regard to our workshops you can contact our helpdesk.