Coordinating Center

CSBC Data And Resource Coordinating Center

As the Data and Resource coordinating center for the CSBC program, Sage Bionetworks is dedicated to fostering an open and collaborative scientific culture in which CSBC researchers can rapidly collaborate across institutional boundaries. We work to engage all the centers at the level of active scientific research in order to build a unified interface to program resources. Using the Synapse informatics platform, we are able to provide centralized environment that supports active collaboration while research is in progress, rather than simply an archival system for completed study resources. Synapse helps scientific teams integrate disparate data, find and correct analysis errors faster, and organize diverse teams around complex scientific problems. Unplanned and innovative connections among projects emerge across initial project boundaries over time because all these projects are hosted on the same service, and the work is publicly visible. As the CSBC coordinating center, we also engage scientific communities and the public around CSBC and PS-ON data and interests through activities such as DREAM challenges, curriculum, and the CSBC website.

Julie Bletz, PhD, Director

Julie is the Director of Team Science and Community Engagement and leads a team of research scientists, program/project managers, community managers, data managers, and data curators to support large interdisciplinary research efforts. Her team leverages evidence-based team science strategies to engage research communities, motivate collaboration and facilitate resource sharing and knowledge dissemination.

James Eddy, PhD, Director

Dr. Eddy is the Director of Informatics & Computing at Sage Bionetworks. He is a computational biologist and cancer researcher with experience in developing and managing high-throughput molecular databases, bioinformatics pipelines, and analytical workflows. He and his team serve as key technical contributors on the data coordinating center for several large consortia, including CSBC, PS-ON, and the NCI Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN). Dr. Eddy is well versed in best practices for reproducible data science in biomedical research.

Verena Chung, Bioinformatics Engineer

Verena Chung is a Python enthusiast whose core focus is to help promote Open Science and FAIR data practices, including data from CSBC. As a bioinformatics engineer at Sage Bionetworks, she helps build and maintain tools and resources that others can leverage to upload and explore data.

Brynn Zalmanek, Associate Bioinformatics Analyst/Engineer

Brynn is a Data Curator at Sage Bionetworks with a background in library science. She curates the publications, datasets, and tools in the CSBC portal and works on refining the metadata so that the resources CSBC generates can be found, accessed, and reused.

Amber Nelson, Administrative Coordinator