The Eurolife Consortium has been awarded an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership grant towards its transnational project aiming at updating the conceptual and ethical considerations that arise from Biomedical Big Data (BBD) collection and use.

Following the announcement from 3 August 2020 by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) acting as the National Agency for EU Higher Education Cooperation within the Erasmus+ programme, the Eurolife Consortium will receive EUR 448.389,00 of co-funding to implement the project titled DATAETHICS – Changing Landscapes in the Health and Life Sciences: Ethical Challenges of Big Data under the coordination of the University Medical Center Göttingen, University of Göttingen.

The grant constitutes a major milestone in the cooperation of the Eurolife partnership, cementing the over 20-year cooperation and achievements to date, and opening a new chapter of enhanced and increased cooperation with the aim of further developing and sharing innovative practices and promoting strategic cooperation and exchanges of experiences in life sciences.

The project’s planning process was supported with a funding from the Europa Programm of the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony (Niedersächsischen Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, MWK).

 

 

This transnational project, which will be implemented over three years aims at updating the conceptual and ethical considerations that arise from Biomedical Big Data (BBD) collection and use. It will be implemented by the Eurolife consortium – nine top-tier European academic institutions and medical centres from nine countries, each with worldwide reputation in research excellence. Complemented by the engagement of a large network of associate partners, who will participate in the process of knowledge production and dissemination, the project will additionally act to further enhance industry-university cooperation and will expedite cooperation between EU countries to identify best practices for BBD. The consolidation of local expertise, including that from industry offer theory and case studies of high pedagogical merit, with students acting as peer-tutors and sharing knowledge and abilities acquired with their fellows.

The consortium will develop a novel Open Education Resources: a learning environment via an interactive e-platform and an on-line training package of courses, through which we will address the identified challenges with respect to curation, interpretation and analysis of accumulating biomedical datasets. With the novel practical tools, content and guidelines offered here, the project brings improved and durable availability of training with real-life examples, which will allow acquisition of the breadth and depth of skills and knowledge that students and teachers currently need in the life sciences. Furthermore, it facilitates unification of learning criteria and opens a window of opportunity for continuous improvement in the delivery of quality teaching in Higher Education.

To fulfill its mission, DATAETHICS project will yield four core results as regards the ethical use of BBD:

–    Transfer of best practices

–    Development of broadly accessible online material collections

–    Establishment of a material repository for continuous material collections

–    Development of ethic models for biomedical, health care institutions and industry dealing with BBD

Four semi-annual Summer and Winter Schools lie at the heart of this broad, open, transcultural and interdisciplinary implementation approach. The Schools are further augmented by students’ participation in virtual collaborative exercises focusing on case studies. These activities will be enhanced by VaKE, which will create a sense of student-teacher mutual responsibility in the project and encourage equal dialogue “empowering” students to fully engage with the project.

More information and the link to the website of the project will be announced in the due course.

DATAETHICS – Changing Landscapes in the Health and Life Sciences: Ethical Challenges of Big Data

Consortium

For questions, please contact the project’s coordination team at the University Medical Center Göttingen:

Agnieszka Buelens                          Argyris Papantonis                         Tim Gollisch