Webinar: Data protection and security aspects of running simulations on personal data with HPC

PerMedCoE webinars are open to everyone interested in PerMedCoE tools and activities. The webinars will include a 30-40 minutes presentation and a Q&A section of around 15 minutes. The recording of this webinar will be publicly available on this web page and the PerMedCoE YouTube channel.

Webinar:

Speakers:Sarah Peter and Adrian Thorogood (Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, University of Luxembourg)
Date and time:Tuesday 11th October 2022, 15-16 CEST
Target group:Anyone interested in running in silico simulations of biological systems and the data protection aspects to be considered
Learning outcomes:Outlining the ethics principles to be considered when working with sensitive research data on an HPC environment
Identifying the risks of working in shared environments and which measures you can take to secure sensitive data.
Watch the recording
Access the slides

When processing health and genetic data in High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, researchers must consider the application of research ethics principles as well as the General Data Protection Regulation, including issues of identifiability, duties of confidentiality and security, and accountability. A Data Protection Impact Assessment can be a useful tool to identify and mitigate any risks to the rights and freedoms of data subjects (patients and research participants). 

In this webinar we will also highlight the risks of working with sensitive data on an HPC cluster and we will provide you guidelines and measures that can help you secure your data and its processing. Additionally, we will give a short overview of what you should look out for when selecting or developing software to work on this data.

About the speakers:

Sarah Peter studied Bioinformatics and worked for several years as a researcher and data manager at the Max Planck Institute. Now she works at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, UNILU, as an Infrastructure Engineer in the R3 and IT Infrastructure team. She is also the liaison for the HPC team. Since GDPR has come into effect, she spends some of her time doing risk analysis for the institute’s IT infrastructure and the HPC cluster.

Adrian Thorogood is a lawyer and Research & Development Specialist in the Bioinformatics Core, Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, UNILU. He works with the European 1+ Million Genomes Project and other infrastructure projects to address ethical and legal issues that arise when sharing genomic and health-related data cross-border and internationally. His research focuses on how genomic sequencing platforms, information and networking technologies, open science practices, and patient empowerment movements are disrupting research and health care (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5078-8164).