The first engagement of last week involved chairing a session involving introducing the ELIXIR project and overseeing the election of a Chair (Søren Bruak) and vice-Chair (BBSRC’s Alf Game) for the ELIXIR Interim Board, with the voting participants involving the nine countries that have thus far signed up formally. Scientific and funding representatives of a good many other countries also attended both the election and the meeting following, and it was gratifying to note the consonance of purpose (‘a collaboration of the willing’) in the governance and rollout of everyone involved in this major piece of e-infrastructure development.

I then attended our next Institute Assessment Panel, this time at The Roslin Institute. As with the other Panels, whose form it followed, it was a very packed but worthwhile agenda, and a useful opportunity to discuss all of the projects and activities en masse. Again, with another three visits before Christmas, it will not be until the New Year that BBSRC Council determines the final founding outcomes. [...]

Last week was a truncated post-Bank Holiday week, mainly with internal meetings. One of these involved a very useful visit to JBOS, the (BBSRC-hosted) Joint Building and Office Services looks after both the physical structure of Polaris House in Swindon as well as many common services such as the switchboard, the Post Room (> 7000 items per day…), catering and the like. It is often easy to forget such infrastructures (except when things don’t work), and so it was nice to meet the folk who look after us in this way.

We had another meeting of the ‘Pharmaceutical Forum’, a group that brings the Chief Executives of BBSRC, EPSRC and MRC together with senior representatives of the Pharmaceutical Industry. [...]

Planning and performing a scientific research programme (notwithstanding the odd scientific stereotype) bears many similarities to my activities for BBSRC, in that it involves looking forward into an uncertain future and deploying the available intellectual and other resources to best effect. I often find that this involves a rather varied diet of activities (appropriately enough, given that we are funders of food research…), and last week was no exception. Although other funders such as MRC, NERC and the Wellcome Trust are involved, BBSRC is the lead for driving forward elements of the next phase of funding for ELIXIR, an emerging and flexible infrastructure for bioinformatics across Europe, and (following our announcement of a first tranche of funding) one meeting this week concentrated on that. [...]