Biofortified goes to the White House!

Back on 22 May 2013, we asked you to Nominate your Champion of Change! Specifically, we asked you to consider nominating our GENERA project for the Open Science Champions of Change event hosted by the White House Office of Science & Technology. They must have gone through the nominations pretty quickly, because they hosted an event for selected nominees on 20 June.
Thanks to all of you who nominated us! Biology Fortified, Inc. (BFI) was one of those selected nominees. We weren’t selected to be one of the Champions of Change this time, but with your help we can make GENERA such a great success that we will be selected next time 🙂
There were 13 people and organizations selected as Champions of Change, many of which are involved in genomic medicine, with a smattering of other fields. I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone, but as far as I know, BFI was the only agriculture-related organization there. Surely there are other agriculture open science initiatives! Let us know in the comments and we may feature them in future blog posts. Maybe we can get them nominated next time!
I was really surprised that no one was there to represent the recently unveiled Agriculture portal at Data.gov.  I haven’t had the chance to play with the resources much, but it seems to have a lot of great food and agriculture related data not just for the US but globally. Another great open science resource is eXtension, which brings us superior searching for agriculture related information from university extension agents.
Even though there are lots of agriculture related efforts that could have been recognized, the people and organizations who were recognized are pretty awesome! Let’s hear it for the 13 Open Science Champions of Change!  They’ve each written blog posts on the OSTP blog.

1. David Altshuler: Creating a Global Alliance for Sharing of Genomic and Clinical Data.
2. Jack Andraka: Open Access: The Pathway to Innovation.
3. Atul Butte: Transforming Open Access Biomedical Data into New Drugs and Diagnostics.
4. Drew Endy: Most of the Smartest Bioengineers Work for Someone Else.
5. Stephen Friend: Big Data and Personalized Medicine.
6. Paul Ginsparg: Large-Scale Open Access for Research and Outreach.
7. Kathy Giusti: Democratizing the Science, Accelerating the Cure.
8. Eric Kansa: Indiana Jones and the Dungeon of Lost Data.
9. David Lipman: Genbank and Pubmed Central: Creating the Tools for Scientific Discovery.
10. Rebecca Moore: Open Science for a Changing Planet.
11. William Noel: You’ve Got to See it Before You Can Read it! Making Ancient Texts and Images Available on the Web.
12. Jeremiah Ostriker: Reaching for the Stars: Bringing the Cosmos to a Computer Near You.
13. John Quackenbush: GenoSpace: Making Big Data in Health Care Useful and Usable.

Find more information about the Champions in the OSTP press release.