The DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) has released its newest 5-Year Strategic Plan: Innovating Genomics to Serve the Changing Planet (download a copy at jointgeno.me/2024StrategicPlan.) This plan aligns the DOE Office of Science user facility with broader national efforts to promote and stimulate a bioeconomy, where renewable, biological resources drive processes, products, and services.
Advancing the bioeconomy will provide a wide range of benefits, but it also requires a deep understanding of biological systems. The JGI strategic plan lays out how users and the global research community will bridge fundamental knowledge gaps to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing.
“We will continue to be a user facility that provides genomic capabilities. We specialize in doing this at scale, providing our users not just with data, but offering expertise and resources to help them turn these data into insights and knowledge in support of the DOE science mission. Additionally, we will continue to focus on stewardship for the taxpayer money that we are getting, managing our people and resources responsibly,” said JGI Director Nigel Mouncey. “In creating or contributing to the data resources needed for the bioeconomy, we are engaging with diverse and new user communities. And everything that we do will continue to be aimed at supporting the global user community that does science. What we do goes far beyond supporting those users who work with the JGI through approved proposals; there’s a much larger community of people who use JGI-produced data for purposes that support our scientific mission.”
In service of solutions that will impact society, the 2024 strategic plan introduces the JGI’s new vision to lead genomic innovation for a sustainable bioeconomy. To accomplish this vision, an updated mission statement for the user facility sets out to support the global research community with advanced genomic capabilities, large scale data, and professional expertise while responsibly managing people and resources.
“The plan looks toward exciting new directions in science, technology and data science for the JGI,” noted JGI Deputy for Science Axel Visel, “and we’ll continue to build on existing strengths to accomplish this vision.” Over a year and a half, Visel drove the effort, comprised of holding JGI-internal leadership and planning workshops, as well as collecting extensive input from all JGI staff, Biosciences and Berkeley Lab leadership, JGI advisory committees, and its primary funders at BER. “Under our well-established user facility model, we expect to offer our user community an exciting range of new tools and capabilities to support their scientific investigations of biological and environmental systems.”
Learn more here on the JGI website.
