Enhancing Bioinformatics Services in Minority Institutions (October 18, 2024)

Librarians from Morehouse School of Medicine, Pacific University Oregon, and Adelphi University share their experiences growing and fostering bioinformatics programs at their institutions.

Friday, October 18, 2-3pm ET | 1-2pm CT | 12-1pm MT | 11am-12pm PT

Melisa Balos, Morehouse School of Medicine

Melisa’s degrees are in International Relations and Political Science with a specialty in Energy and Environmental Security, but she is also halfway through completing her MLIS with a focus on Academic Librarianship. She is the Interlibrary Loan Librarian and a Reference Librarian for Morehouse School of Medicine.

Melisa's position as a librarian is to act as a liaison to the bioinformatics program by using her skills in organizing, accessing, and managing vast amounts of information. Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field, she helps foster collaboration across her institution and beyond—which is especially fruitful in Atlanta, supporting Morehouse School of Medicine’s overall mission of health equity. The challenges, however, are how to bridge these overarching goals and ground them in a practical way that facilitates scientific advancement ethically and equitably.

Angela Lee, Pacific University Oregon

Angela Lee is the Health Sciences Librarian for the College of Health Professions at Pacific University Oregon. Her primary responsibilities include teaching information literacy, developing evidence-based practice curriculum, promoting lifelong learning skills, and collection development. She received her MLS and MSW at the University of Hawaii. She has over 25 years of work experience as a health sciences librarian including 6 years of experience at Pacific and over 20 years at four state universities providing educational, informational, research, and clinical information services and support. Her current research interests are health literacy, interprofessional education, critical appraisal, data management, and bioinformatics. 

Angela's presentation will cover three areas: (1) How Pacific University, a small private research university and a minority-serving institution was able to establish a strong health professions program and how they are developing pipeline programs to promote health careers for students of color and low-income students; (2) the librarian’s role in expanding information literacy instruction to include the teaching of bioinformatics; (3) how allied health professions programs such as pharmaceutical sciences and genetic counseling offer practical opportunities for genomics literacy and how to target them in library program planning.

Aditi Bandyopadhyay, Adelphi University

Aditi Bandyopadhyay is a Full Professor and Science Librarian at Adelphi University. She has been at Adelphi since Fall 1994. In addition to her MLS with a focus on STM librarianship, Aditi has a Ph.D. in Plant Biology. At Adelphi, Aditi is responsible for teaching library instruction sessions to science undergraduate and graduate students, providing research support to all science faculty and students and developing information resources and services in science and technology.

Aditi's presentation focuses on her initiatives to promote NCBI bioinformatics resources to Biology faculty who teach genetics courses. Adelphi offers a program called CSTEP (College Science Advancement Program) to enhance the representation of historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students in the STEM field. In her presentation, she will also discuss her role in this program as the Science Librarian at Adelphi.
 

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Class Details

Date(s): October 18, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT
Platform: Zoom
CE Credits: 0.00
This is a National NNLM class.
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Class Contacts

Host/Instructor: Katherine Majewski
Technical Assistance: Molly Knapp

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