Friday, August 14, 2026
Stephen C.J. Parker, Ph.D. will present "PanKbase: An Open, FAIR Knowledge Base of the Human Pancreas to Accelerate Diabetes Research" from 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. EDT.
About the Seminar
PanKbase, the Pancreas Knowledge Base, is an open, NIDDK-supported resource that organizes, harmonizes, and disseminates data on the human pancreas to accelerate diabetes research, with an initial focus on type 1 diabetes. Multimodal pancreas data are generated across many programs but remain fragmented and processed in inconsistent ways, which makes them hard to discover and reuse. PanKbase brings these data together into a centralized, computation-ready, FAIR resource spanning genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, and physiological measurements from human donors. In this talk we will describe how PanKbase applies FAIR principles and uniform reprocessing to turn disparate datasets into a reusable foundation for the whole community, from basic biomedical research scientists to the machine learning field. I will highlight how open sharing and reuse can generate new insight into pancreatic biology and speed progress toward preventing and treating diabetes.
About the Speaker
Stephen C.J. Parker, Ph.D., is a tenured Professor of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Human Genetics and Biostatistics. He directs the Epigenomic Metabolic Medicine Center and the Integrative Data Analytics Core. His group develops integrative computational methods that interpret non-coding DNA and single-cell multi-omic tissue data to translate diabetes and related metabolic trait genome-wide association signals into biological mechanisms and therapeutic insights. He is a standing member of the NIH Genetics of Health and Disease Study Section and received the American Diabetes Association Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award in 2024. He is a Principal Investigator and Steering Committee Member of PanKbase.
About the Seminar Series
The seminar is open to the public and registration is required each month. Individuals who need interpreting services and/or other reasonable accommodations to participate in this event should contact Allison Hurst at 301-670-4990. Requests should be made at least five days in advance of the event.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy hosts this seminar series to highlight examples of data sharing and reuse on the second Friday of each month at noon ET. The monthly series highlights researchers who have taken existing data and found clever ways to reuse the data or generate new findings. A different NIH institute or center will also share its data science activities each month.