BioExcel-2 Deliverable D4.4 – Final report on dissemination and training

This document describes the dissemination and training activities that have been completed since July 2020, including an estimate of the impact that they had. The dissemination section presents information about the project website, social media channels, dissemination events and publications, as well as a report on the EMBO Workshop Advances and Challenges in Biomolecular Simulations organised in October 2021, the BioExcel flagship event. The training section presents the events organised and delivered in this period, the last updates in the BioExcel competency framework and a long-term impact assessment.

The EMBO workshop Advances and Challenges in Biomolecular Simulations was successfully delivered in a virtual format in October 2021, after being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event included 30 speakers, both invited and selected from abstracts, and 98 posters. It was attended by 173 participants from 16 countries worldwide, who participated in lectures and networking sessions. We observed a very low dropout rate over the four days of the event. According to the results of the event feedback survey, the overall evaluation of the meeting was: 40.71% ‘excellent’, 45.13% ‘very good’, and 12.39% ‘good’.

The BioExcel social media channels have seen an upward growth since June 2020, with 3000 new followers on Twitter and 1300 on LinkedIn. The BioExcel website has received over 54000 unique users. BioExcel has participated in a total of 121 events, where we estimate that we have reached a minimum of 8172 people. In addition, BioExcel partners have published 39 articles.

BioExcel converted the 2020 Summer School on Biomolecular Simulations to a remote event, thanks to the experience that we gained running virtual courses since 2019. Since then, we have run 3 more editions of the event, with improvements in each of them based on the experienced gained and the feedback from trainers and participants. In addition, we have run 17 training events, many of them in collaboration with other initiatives such as PRACE, other CoEs or National Competence Centres. The feedback received is very positive. All the events in this period were remote, but we plan to run a face-to-face Summer School in Sardinia in June 2022.

The BioExcel competency profile has been updated in collaboration with PerMedCoE, so that the computing and parallel computing competencies of both profiles are common. We created six career profiles that are available on the EMBL-EBI Competency Hub. Two learning pathways, collections of training resources, have been created to guide learners in the use of HPC machines and Jupyter notebooks.

The long-term impact of previous training activities shows that most respondents use the skills gained during the courses and many of them teach others, which broadens the impact that our training has in the community.