The Bioinformatics Grand Challenges Consortium (BGCC) formed in October 2021 to identify the grand challenges facing bioinformatics. Education and training became the starting point, and the first question the consortium put to itself was what challenges educators and trainers will face over the next 10 to 20 years. A working group drawn from eight organizations with worldwide, regional and national reach — ISCB, GOBLET, APBioNET, Bioclues, ELIXIR, SoIBio, H3ABioNet and NIBLSE — proposed 19 candidate challenges. Consolidating them took several working meetings, in which the group merged overlapping candidates into themes and distinguished the challenges likely to persist over 20 years from those that additional funding or time would resolve. Seven remained, and Nature Biotechnology published them in 2023.
The paper defined the seven challenges without prescribing solutions, stating that they were identified “to initiate action within the community, spurring debate and discussion toward finding the necessary solutions.” Identifying a challenge does not establish which stakeholders should address it, or how. The consortium’s second phase took up that question, and it has run considerably longer than the first.
The second phase applied one common framework to all seven challenges. GC1 was addressed first. What that exercise taught the group shaped the four questions then used for the remaining six, and GC1 was later realigned onto the same four so that all seven challenges ask the same thing. The group considered six stakeholder groups for each challenge: trainers and facilitators; professional bodies and councils; employers in academia and industry; trainees; funders and regulators; and media houses. Each group was asked the same four questions — what its role is in addressing the challenge, what actions it can take, what resources it would need, and how progress would be measured. This page presents the resulting answers, challenge by challenge and stakeholder by stakeholder.
This remains a working document. Some answers are more developed than others, several questions are unresolved, and the stakeholder framework itself is open to debate. Review is invited on all of it, and disagreement is as useful to the consortium as endorsement. Comments submitted here will inform a revised version of this document; the source paper linked above lists the consortium’s membership.
Seven grand challenges in bioinformatics education and training, worked across six stakeholder groups. Rate how solvable each proposed solution is (solvability index), and comment directly by quoting the whole passage or specific parts of it — just select the relevant text.