CyVerse Partners with Phoenix Bioinformatics
The funding supplement will assist CyVerse in expanding upon its existing services while continuing to provide researchers and educators with leading data management and analysis tools, resources, and services.
Phoenix Bioinformatics, a nonprofit organization created and led by scientists in support of science, will advise CyVerse leadership on transitioning the project to a fully self-sustainable model, enabling continued growth of its services and data management resources.
The collaboration is funded by a supplementary award to CyVerse from the National Science Foundation.
"We are grateful for the ongoing investment by NSF in CyVerse's sustainability and excited to work with Phoenix Bioinformatics to develop new services for expanding CyVerse's offerings," said Eric Lyons, CyVerse Principal Investigator and Project Director.
Lyons added that the partnership with Phoenix Bioinformatics will enable CyVerse to expand in terms of the services it offers while continuing to provide the data management resources CyVerse's more than 80,000 users rely on to get their science and teaching done.
"We are especially happy to work with Phoenix because of their history and expertise with academic projects," said CyVerse Assistant Director Mary Margaret Sprinkle. "Phoenix Bioinformatics transformed a grant-funded, academic project into a completely self-sustaining resource, and we are excited to have them advising us as we strengthen our sustainability model going forward."
Phoenix Bioinformatics was founded in 2013 to support TAIR, The Arabidopsis Information Resource, a scientific database of genetic and molecular biology data for the common model pant Arabidopsis thaliana. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation, the creators of TAIR needed to develop novel options to continue to support the project.
The result of their efforts was Phoenix Bioinformatics: a successful startup supporting scientific data and software repositories to continue developing beyond their initial funding phases.
Collaborating with CyVerse is also an opportunity for Phoenix Bioinformatics to work with a different type of research resource, in that CyVerse is a set of computational tools and resources rather than a data repository. Previously, the company has worked mainly with informational resources, such as scientific knowledge bases or data repositories.
"CyVerse is such an important resource for the scientific research community that we are thrilled to be able to work with them to help them achieve a sustainable support model. We want to ensure that CyVerse continues to thrive so that it can serve future generations of scientists," said Eva Huala, Executive Director of Phoenix Bioinformatics.
CyVerse's work with Phoenix Bioinformatics is funded by NSF award number DBI-1743442.