Fiona Birkman
Distinguished Professor, Simon Fraser University
Microbe-loving bioinformatics, genomics, and integrative data analytics researcher, aiming to better control infectious diseases – and support health – in a holistic, sustainable way.
Holistic (or, better, wholistic) health research benefits from wholistic use of computing resources. I will describe how a combination of HPC, cloud, and storage resources have been critical for enabling more wholistic research involving the integration of exceptionally diverse data, sensitive data sharing approaches, and data analytics.
Examples will be provided of how integrated analyses of environmental, microbial, animal, and human clinical, behavioural, and socioeconomic data have been providing surprising insights into previously unappreciated factors that impact human health. As we learn more about the interconnectedness of environmental health and human health, environmentally sustainable supercomputing is also becoming more important.
Additionally, it’s becoming clear that more integration of social sciences and computing sciences approaches are necessary to overcome barriers for diverse data integration and respectful data sharing. More effective One Health / One Ecosystem solutions need efficient, sustainable integrated computing infrastructure.