Rafael C. Jimenez is Chief Technical Officer of ELIXIR (the European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information). He is a biologist and a computer scientist specialised in the development and management of Bioinformatics services. For the last 15 years Rafael has worked delivering services in diverse Bioinformatics organisations, societies and community projects. For the last 7 years he worked as technical lead of the Proteomics Services Team at the European Bioinformatics Institute and as technical coordinator of ELIXIR.
At the core of ELIXIR’s strategy is the recognition that large-scale data management in the life sciences is not limited to a few sites. A European data infrastructure must be able to cope with the aggregation, annotation and integration of data from thousands of laboratories as well as scaling these data-services to millions of users worldwide. ELIXIR has progressed through a long preparatory and interim phase, which included gaining the support of national and European funders, as well as coordinating the efforts from more than 120 institutions involved in the provision of bioinformatics services. In 2015 ELIXIR moves into its Service Deployment Phase. In this talk I will explain how ELIXIR will start to implement this part of the ELIXIR programme and how important it is for ELIXIR to collaborate with communities and other research infrastructures in order to build effective, coordinated services for users.