Dean Flanders

Dean Flanders is the Head of Informatics at Friedrich Miescher Institute, which is a biomedical institute in Basel Switzerland funded by Novartis. He has an education in chemistry and biochemistry, and IT experience in industrial as well as academic environments. His role is responsible for defining and implementing the IT strategy for 360 scientists by supporting the IT needs of research groups and technology platforms such as DNA sequencing, proteomics, imaging, bioinformatics, and animal facility. This includes the user environment, petabytes of storage, a campus network interconnected with partner networks, and over 180 servers. He also helped co-found the Basel Computational Biology Center (BC2) as a high performance computing environment to enable access to computational resources. As well as co-founding and currently presiding as the president of the Swiss National Grid Association. In addition to participation in SyBIT, which is the IT support component of the SystemsX project. He also has served as an expert to the Digital Agenda Forum at the European Commission on behalf of Switzerland. Additionally, he participates in EGI.eu as well as the Swiss eScience team project. He is as well the project leader of the Open IRIS resource management platform for core facilities and laboratories, which has over 6000 users, and is used internationally by a wide variety of organizations, http://iris.science-it.ch. In 2017 Open IRIS was recognized with an award for innovation in “Laboratory Effectiveness” from S-Lab and the UK Science Park Association in the area of laboratory design, management, and operation.