president’s & executive director’s message
It’s All About the Data
At the 2018 Annual Meeting, Lab Matters Editor Gynene Sullivan had the
opportunity to sit down and chat with incoming APHL President Joanne
Bartkus and APHL Executive Director Scott Becker. Here is a transcript of
the interview, which has been edited for clarity.
Gynene Sullivan: Joanne, since you’re
coming in as president, can you talk a little bit
about your priorities for APHL?
We need to integrate
bioinformatics, knowledge
management, laboratory systems,
next generation sequencing, the way
we process data, the way we share
data, and the way we interact with
partners to work with data.
Joanne Bartkus, President, APHL
Joanne Bartkus: This is a bit of an
exaggeration but it came to me in a
blinding flash one morning as I woke up:
it’s about the data. Everything that we
do centers on the data, the information
and the knowledge that we provide to
our partners to the public. If you look at
APHL’s strategic map, there are a number
of activities and priorities that are related
to informatics and data science. My view
is that we need to better unite informatics
and “data science”—which I am defining
as data manipulation that does not
involve actually transferring data from
one place to another. We need to integrate
bioinformatics, knowledge management,
laboratory systems, next generation
sequencing, the way we process data,
the way we share data, and the way we
interact with partners to work with data.
APHL has a lot to offer in these areas, and
pulling it together into a more cohesive
data strategy will help APHL figure out
where we fit in and where we need to
increase our partnerships.
Scott Becker: We also need to consider
data sharing from the legal and policy
perspective. APHL is increasingly involved
in this area as we grow our cloud
computing capabilities and work with
state agencies and national governments.
The legal issues are pretty daunting, but
we aren’t going to be able to tackle them
until we make this a priority. Otherwise
it’ll just sit on the (strategic) map and we
won’t touch it. Thinking about it over the
course of a year will be very helpful not
just for APHL, but for all of our members
and partners as well.
Bartkus: I’m glad you reminded me
about the policy piece. Data sharing and
data use agreements are frequently a
stumbling block for us. Being able to make
the most effective use of the data that we
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LAB MATTERS Summer 2018
generate and the data that we need to
access is a big priority.
Sullivan: How does this priority feed into
planning for the next generation of laboratory
scientists? Do you think that scientists are
going to have to be more tech savvy than
bench savvy in trying to fit technology and
traditional testing methods together?
Bartkus: Absolutely. And that’s something
we’ve been talking about for years in
my laboratory. Suppose that clinical
laboratories, for example, start using more
sophisticated methods where they might
be doing their own DNA sequencing.
Whereas currently the public health
laboratory is doing (the sequencing),
we might eventually just be receiving
data and analyzing it as opposed to
generating the raw data itself. So we’re
going to be more involved in converting
data into knowledge. Even though we
do some of that now, I think it’s going to
be a bigger area and it might even be a
brand new skill set and job area. Where
this new paradigm will sit is not clear,
but right now I think laboratories are at
the forefront of thinking about it. We’re
already doing (the data analysis) with
next generation sequencing but I think
it’s going to be much more integral to our
daily work. And we’ve joked around about
referring to “labidemiologists” but we’re
going to need to be doing more of the
data analytics than we have in the past.
It’s a different workforce and a different
skill set.
Becker: That’s absolutely true. I also think
that the workforce coming in now is eager
to take on a new skill. Millennials and
Generation Z, who are just hitting our
labs, are digital natives and this is how
they think. It’s crucial that we build on
their talents to develop strong science
communicators. It wasn’t that long ago
that we didn’t really understand what
bioinformatics was. And now we’re deeply
involved and it’s just been a brief four
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