User talk:JonR
I am the Network Director of Oxfordshire Bioscience Network, and I also started up "UK Bioinformatics Forum", as well as Bioinformatics.Net, a links directory I created when I was a PhD student (a few moons ago indeed!). I took over running the Young Bioinformaticians' Forum in 2004, when 130 delegates attended (up from 40 in 2003), which was integrated into BioSysBio once I noted the impressive production of that meeting by John Cumbers, a delegate at YBF 2004. In 2005, YBF and BioSysBio combined attracted up to 180 delegates, and in 2007 - BioSysBio sold out, testament to the hard work of John and his team. In 2006-7, the non-for-profit networking organisation I direct (OBN, Oxfordshire Bioscience Network) is a significant contributor to BioSysBio, donating funds and my own company's (Oxford Informatics Ltd, aka "OI Ltd") server hosts the BioSysBio website.
Most of my time is spent on "cluster advocacy", promoting the rising star of the biotech cluster in the South East of England, raising funds to cover a growing office at Oxfordshire Bioscience Network, and delivering up to 20 networking meetings each year attracting over 1200 delegates in the last 12 months. I also created BioTrinity, the first business partnering meeting and showcase to feature the Oxford and Southern UK supercluser, and Discovery Informatics Forum which has consistently attracted over 100 (mostly industry) delegates to London each year.
Once of my pet likes is putting together industry and academia in business-focused settings to encourage collaboration. My first formal experiment in this process takes place on November 21st, at the Discovery Informatics Forum II with formal partnering. If you don't know what partnering is, I've written an FAQ: What is Partnering?
Basically, if you sit down before a conference, plan who are the 5 most important people you should meet who are also attending the meeting, think of exactly what points you need to discuss and structure what you are going to say, contact them and arrange to sit down and talk face-to-face with each one for 30 minutes at the conference, you have laid the groundwork for future working together. Electronic partnering systems now facilitate this (mostly automatically), and are widely used in business but not academic conferences - but form an ideal tool for fomenting collaborations between all parties (ie. not just B2B, but B2S and S2S).
S - Science B - Business I - Informatics
Another favourite applications area of mine is bioinformatics - currently referred as life science informatics where scientists meet biotech/pharma meets commercial informatics. This is further complicated becuase the scientists may be on the informatics or the biological science side, so here you have many more interactions (social business networking), and the traditional (or recent) form of one company to one company partnering falls down. From this, one can propose that "Consortium Partnering", where several parties who may or may not have already initiated one-to-one "business" relationships could electronically arrange a meeting - a kind of "plus one" arrangement for "wedding" guests.
My Background
I grew up in Oxford, lived in Manchester (BSc), Liverpool (MSc), Spain (Pamplona, Teaching English), Surrey (PhD), London (Writing Up), and returned to Oxford for post-doctoral work.
I trained a plant molecular geneticist, post-docd at Univ. Oxf., I became interested in bioinformatics, self-taught programmer (LAMP technologies, esp. Perl/MySQL), trained recently in project management (PRINCE2 practioner qualified, APM group), soon to be starting my first MBA modules, and I am currently looking at developing my experience into business development in the biotechnology industry.
I particularly enjoy strategic development and business development, and witnessing projects come to successful fruition.
My hobbies currently include programming and speculating on publically listed biotech companies (amateur biotechnology investment analysis, although I do seem to be quite good at this I probably wouldn't enjoy investing other people's pension funds)
Dr Jonathan D Rees
49 Swinburne Road
Oxford OX4 4BE
United Kingdom
Mob. (UK) +44 (0)7970893371
Email: jon.rees@oxfordinformatics.com
