Omar Harb is the scientific liaison and manager of outreach activities at the Penn Center for Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. He also works with EuPathDB – the Eukaryotic Pathogen Database Resources. Harb was representing EuPathDB this morning at the booth in the exhibit hall. EuPathDB is part of a larger consortium of bioinformatics databases that include FungiDB.

Can you tell us a little more about EuPathDB?

Our goal is to provide free resources for scientists to access large-scale datasets and ask intuitive questions. Researchers can log into the site to ask genomic questions, and also questions about isolates and population data. It can provide detailed information based on an assortment of variables. We want to make sure that we provide a system so scientists can ask questions about the underlying data. Perhaps more importantly, we want them to be able to integrate data with results and finding from other experiments.

What are your goals at ASTMH’s annual meeting?

At ASTMH, there are many researchers who work on tropical diseases, we want to make sure people are aware of this resource. We’d also like to talk to researchers about their data. We’re a community resource so it’s good to interact with them and find out what they want from our database and how to integrate their own data.

What have you heard from meeting participants?

We are heavily used, free and community driven. People see us as a partner in their research. People come up to us and say that this database is like their Facebook. They use Facebook and the database everyday. So that’s a pretty good compliment.