Dr. Bandrowski trained as a bench neurophysiologist, working to elucidate physiological mechanisms of learning and epilepsy. However, soon after postdoc, Dr. Bandrowski began to work in data, starting with the annotation of the human genome for Celera Inc. Dr. Bandrowski moved to neuroinformatics with the award of the Neuroscience Information Framework by the NIH’s Blueprint for Neuroscience. The goal of this project was to create a comprehensive list of databases for neuroscience and to federate search across as many of these databases as possible. The framework grew to the most comprehensive search system for neuroscience data on the web. This broad overview of the data landscape highlighted the need to align and structure data and dearth of reagent information, especially how reagents and tools are cited in the scientific literature.

The process of data curation is the structuring and aligning of data to meet the needs of some downstream group, mechanism, or database. Dr. Bandrowski’s work was initially to structure data into a particular format, to meet the needs of the PANTHER database, however, her role moved to creating data structures that are accessible to multiple systems, or FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable); leading interdisciplinary teams to create community standards, and structuring data into formats that are accessible to artificial intelligence systems.

To address reagent underreporting issues, Dr. Bandrowski serves as the lead for the Research Resource Identification, RRID, Initiative, a group dedicated to transforming scholarly communication, which has recently become a non-profit organization. RRIDs are unique identifiers for Key Biological Resources, aggregated by our group from community databases and requested from authors in participating journals.