SIB Biostatistics Support
The BCF provides a consulting service on biostatistics matters, on a mandate from (and partially funded by) the SIB and the Swiss Confederation. This service is aimed at all people active in life sciences in Switzerland. It includes training and teaching, consulting, data analysis, and research collaboration, with a focus on high-throughput technologies in genomics or proteomics.
The service can be provided on a collaborative basis or for a fee, depending on the circumstances: among other factors, the origin and goals of the request (academy or industry), the amount of work involved and our current workload will be taken into account in determining the service provided. For academic groups that require long-term support, we strongly advise to start a discussion at the grant-submission step, and to include a request for a part-time bioinformatician in the grant. By pooling such part-time positions, the BCF is able to offer a longer-term dedicated support.
Consulting usually starts with a short meeting discussing the questions asked. Often, this is enough to help the researcher solve the problem. In other cases, the meeting allows us to define the different possibilities for a forthcoming collaboration.
For more information, please contact us at stat@sib.swiss or by calling Frédéric Schütz at +41 21 692 40 94.
Teaching and Training
We provide short courses and workshops, as well as longer but low-intensity semester courses. More information about recent and upcoming courses is available on the SIB education web page. The Teaching page holds general information about the courses we teach. You can also sign up to remain informed about the education activities at the SIB.
Consulting
The BCF provides services, both paid and unpaid, for the planning, experimental design and analysis of projects, and supports grant proposal writing, resulting in a number of successful grants. We also provide industrial partners with biostatistics and bioinformatics advice, particularly in relation to development and validation of biomarkers.
Data Analysis
We can be more involved in solving the client's problem by performing computationally intensive analysis using our tools and computational resources. Anonymized variable or gene names can be used should their confidentiality be important. We also offer joint analysis of clients' data with our curated version of publicly available clinical and omics datasets.
Research Collaboration
Here, our members will have a prominent role in the project and we supply both data and computational resources, as well as man-hour, with the goal of having co-authorship or intellectual property rights in the product.
Personel Embedding
The client may appoint their researchers to work full or part-time, physically within BCF-SIB, allowing them to use our resources and be involved in our group activities such as the regular internal meetings, while they are still focusing on the client's project.