Meeting Information



Goals for BRIITE Meetings Topics of Past BRIITE Meetings
Meeting descriptions and copies of presentations
BRIITE meetings occur twice a year. The meetings give IT professionals from biomedical organizations an opportunity to exchange ideas and insights that come from real experience in developing IT support for biomedical organizations.

The first BRIITE meeting in 2001 was an informal, ad hoc gathering of a few people who gathered to share ideas that were both practical (e.g., what's the best way to set up secure wireless LANs) and theoretical (e.g., what's the best approach to managing and analyzing expression-array data).

BRIITE meetings provide time for self-organizing discussion groups. Anyone can suggest a discussion group and if the topic attracts enough interest, it happens.

BRIITE meetings have a theme, with a few plenary speakers who address topics relevant to the theme. The sessions with plenary speakers cover substantially less than half of the full meeting time. The rest of the time is spent in smaller interactive discussion groups or in interactive plenary gatherings. Plenary speakers are asked to talk more about larger policy or community or conceptual issues than about the specifics of their own work or the work of their research group. Thus, plenary presentations often inspire the discussion groups that happen later.

The meetings include a session called "Tech Exchange", which consists of brief (usually 10 minutes or less) presentations of "things that worked (or didn't) for us." In this session, meeting attendees are encouraged to share particularly effective (or difficult) IT experiences. Tech Exchange talks usually generate many questions and much discussion. The agenda for the Tech Exchange session is developed at the meeting, based on ideas offered by attendees.

Attendees report that one of the best aspects of BRIITE meetings is the opportunity to meet and interact with a diverse set of people with diverse roles in providing IT support to research-oriented biomedical institutions. The primary goal of BRIITE meetings is the opportunity for interactions among attendees. We consider a meeting to be a major success if contacts and interactions happen after the meeting that would not have happened otherwise.

Attendees in the past have ranged from MDs to biologists to bioinformaticists to business-trained CIOs to network engineers. At a past meeting, one MD commented that he had never before attended a meeting where such a diverse group interacted so effectively.

 
Implementing Security for Research Computing
3–5 Oct 2007
University of California @ San Francisco
Mission Bay Campus
San Francisco, CA

Research Computing Grows Up
3–5 May 2006
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
New York, NY

IT Support for Multi-Institution Collaborative Research
2–4 November 2005
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
La Jolla, CA

IT Operations in a Biomedical Organization
27–29 April 2005
MD Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, TX

Strategic Planning for IT Support of Grant-funded Research, II
22–24 September 2004
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Seattle, WA

Operational Working Meeting
19–21 May 2004
Hartwell Center
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Memphis, TN

Strategic Planning for IT Support of Grant-funded Research
10–12 September 2003
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Seattle, WA

High Performance Computing and the Internet2 in Life Sciences Research
11–13 December 2002
Hartwell Center
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Memphis, TN

Research in a Regulated Environment
17–19 May 2002
Center for Computational Biology
University of Colorado at Denver
Denver, CO

Information Technology Exchange
16–18 November 2001
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Cold Spring Harbor, NY

Initial Ad Hoc Meeting
30 April – 2 May 2001
Fox Chase Cancer Center
Philadelphia, PA