Dementias Platform Australia (DPAU) to accelerate dementia research internationally
Ms Rory Chen1, Dr Vibeke Catts1, Mr Juan Carlo San Jose1, Dr Darren Lipnicki1, Dr Sarah D. Bauermeister2, Professor Perminder S. Sachdev1
1Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), University of New South Wales, UNSW Sydney, Australia
2University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
With dementia as one of the biggest global public health challenges, researchers have yet to understand all the risk and protective factors, let alone find a cure. The best approach to accelerate the progress in dementia research is global collaboration with improved data accessibility.
The Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing at UNSW Sydney is establishing Dementias Platform Australia (DPAU) to support international researchers’ access to data from population-based ageing cohorts from all around the world that will provide new insights for dementia and ageing research.
DPAU has been established in close collaboration with Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) and Monash Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP). Member studies of Cohort Studies of Memory in an International Consortium (COSMIC) are the first to be hosted on DPAU. The DPAU Data Portal facilitates data discovery functions that allow international researchers to explore metadata and identify studies relevant to their aims. The Portal mediates data access through a standardised, auditable and efficient application and approval process. DPAU will curate data following DPUK developed C-Surv ontology with a standard structure, naming and labelling system. The DPAU Analysis Environment hosted on the Monash SeRP provides secure worldwide accessibility to the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for researchers to access and analyse data.
Not only will DPAU make data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR), but it will also make data sharing more secure, transparent and effective, and avoid repetitive practice. DPAU aims to facilitate access to omics and imaging data, and provide cross-platform data access in the near future.
Biography:
Rory joined the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) within the School of Psychiatry in January 2021. She is the manager of Dementias Platform Australia.
Rory is a data scientist, with a MSc in Statistics from UNSW and a BSc in Statistics from Beijing Normal University.
She previously worked at National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) and Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on various clinical trials and observational studies.