Faces, Places, and Big Ideas: A Look Back at Monarch’s 2024 Events
As we step into the new year, the Monarch Initiative is taking a moment to reflect on the milestones and achievements of 2024. Our collaborations — with both our international team and the broader community — are at the heart of Monarch’s mission. Below, we’ve highlighted some of the key moments and events from 2024. We look forward to connecting, both in person and virtually, throughout 2025!
Monarch Knowledge Graph and Tools Hackathon
For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Monarch Initiative hosted an internal in-person hackathon. Held at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, USA from May 6 to 8, 2024, it included eighteen project members, spanning seven different home institutions.
The hackathon focused on aligning efforts, improving the Monarch Knowledge Graph Services, and operationalizing algorithms across the Monarch ecosystem. There was a specific emphasis on upgrading Monarch tools by leveraging LLMs across the Monarch portfolio.
Human Phenotype Ontology Workshops
The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), which is part of the Monarch Initiative family, hosts several workshops and events throughout the year and 2024 was no different! The HPO team hosted the following workshops and events in 2024:
- Mood Affect workshops hosted April 6, 2024 in Budapest, Hungary and June 6, 2024 in Istanbul, Turkey
- NHS Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children showcase (GOSH) hosted June 21, 2024 in London, UK
- European Reference Network Eye Disease workshop (ERN-EYE) hosted July 8, 2024 in Strasbourg, France
- Lymphoma Pathology workshop hosted November 10, 2024 in Farmington, Connecticut, USA
- European Society for Immunodeficiencies Immunology workshop (ESID) hosted November 26–27, 2024 in Berlin, Germany
- Contractures workshops hosted virtually throughout 2024
Learn more about the HPO community and upcoming workshops here: https://obophenotype.github.io/human-phenotype-ontology/community/
Mondo & C-Path Epilepsy Workshop
In October and December 2024, the Mondo team and the Data Science team at the Critical Path Institute (C-Path) hosted the Mondo Disease Ontology Epilepsy Workshop series.
The workshop series brought together epilepsy experts with the goal of
(1) reviewing the classification of epilepsy terms in Mondo
(2) ensuring that the representation of epilepsy terms in Mondo is scientifically accurate
(3) aligning with the current understanding of the disease features, and
(4) ensuring that the representation of epilepsy terms in Mondo is maximally useful for user projects.
A summary of the workshop outcomes can be found here. The Epilepsy workshop will continue in 2025.
If you are interested in participating, you can find more information about the ongoing Epilepsy workshop and future Mondo Workshops here: https://mondo.monarchinitiative.org/pages/workshop/
Mondo Disease Ontology Curate-athon
In November 2024, the Mondo curation team participated in a highly productive 3-day ‘curate-athon’ focused on addressing user requests. Over the course of the event, the team successfully resolved 59 GitHub issues. Building on the success of this initiative, they plan to organize additional curate-athons in 2025.
Learn more about what Mondo accomplished in 2024 in their 2024 Mondo highlights blog.
Scientific Advisory Board Meeting
The Monarch Consortium’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) meets twice yearly with the Monarch Directors. On November 4, 2024, the SAB and Monarch Directors convened in-person in Denver, Colorado, for a half-day event to discuss the Consortium’s past achievements, current progress, and future outlook.
The event was a resounding success! We deeply appreciate the expertise and insights our SAB members contribute to advancing the goals of the Monarch Consortium. Learn about our SAB members here: https://monarchinitiative.org/team
National and International Events
You can catch the Monarch team at national and international events throughout the year! While in-person events have been limited since the pandemic, we were thrilled to see 2024 bring more opportunities for face-to-face engagement. Here are some highlights of events we attended:
- 17th Annual International Biocuration Conference (IBC) in Faridabad, India March 5–8, 2024
- The European Society of Human Genetics Conference (ESHG) in Berlin, Germany, June 1–4, 2024
- Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) in Montréal, Canada, July 15–16, 2024
- 15th International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology (ICBO) in Enschede, Netherlands, July 17–19, 2024
- The NIH Aging and AD/ADRD Omics Data Resources: A Path to Interoperability event (NIA) in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, July 11–12, 2024
- Database Center for Life Sciences BioHackathon 2024 (DBCLS) in Fukushima, Japan, August 23–31, 2024
- 12th annual Global Alliance for Genomics Health Plenary (GA4GH) in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, September 16–20, 2024 (learn more about this even in our blog)
- NHGRI Center of Excellence in Genomic Science Annual Meeting (CEGS) in La Jolla, California, USA, October 28–30, 2024
- American Society of Human Genetics Conference (ASHG) in Denver, Colorado, USA, November 5–9, 2024
We’re so proud of everyone who contributed to these community events and look forward to sharing updates about Monarch and its initiatives at events in 2025!
Funding
Funding to attend and host the events in this blog spanned many sources. Of note, NIH NHGRI 5RM1HG010860, NIH R24 OD011883, NIH NHGRI 5U24HG011449, and the DataWorks! Prize.
