A week in the Life of a ChEMBL Biological Curator - Thursday

 

 

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Ever wonder what a biological curator for ChEMBL does? Read on to find out what we were up to on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in early June.

 

A not-so-typical Wednesday & Thursday in Emma’s week

The EMBL-EBI offers flexible working and part-time roles, this is part of what makes the working environment so inclusive. My part-time role (4 days/week) means that Wednesdays are usually a non-working day. However, a very special event brought me to the office on Wednesday 10th and Thursday 11th June. ChEMBL held our 2nd User Group Meeting where we welcomed over 60 delegates to our beautiful campus for two days of presentations, case studies, workshops, and networking. It’s rare that we get an opportunity for such close engagement with our community of database depositors and users in a single session, and the event provided an insight into the value of ChEMBL to the Medicinal Chemistry and wider community. 

 

On Wednesday, we heard presentations from the Chemical Biology Services team and our data users across academia and industry: this highlighted the wide ranging applications of chemical biology data to the community. On the second day, Sally and I were involved in facilitating the ChEMBL Data Workshop. We’d spent time the previous week developing and testing our format, so it was great to see engagement from our users and receive such valuable feedback.

 

This was not a typical week in the life of a biocurator. Nonetheless, in-person and virtual events do form an important part of the role: we meet our depositors online to discuss feedback on their data submissions and attend internal meetings each week to define curation tasks. Professional development is supported with opportunities to attend EMBL-wide talks and regularly attend conferences to ensure we’re up-to-date with relevant advances in medicinal chemistry, curatorial practices, and emerging technologies. Public engagement and training are also central to EMBL-EBI’s mission and present us with another chance to highlight our resources to the scientific community, and beyond.  

 

Emma Manners