This month, six members of the D4CG team had the opportunity to travel to India to build and strengthen our collaborations and learn from our colleagues there. Support from a University of Chicago Provost’s Global Faculty Award allowed us to make this trip, which included visiting Bai Jerbai Wadia Hospital for Children and Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai and Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute & Research Centre in Delhi as well as conducting our first Data Sharing and Harmonization (DaSH) workshop.
The two-day DaSH workshop brought together clinicians and researchers from throughout India at the University of Chicago Center in Delhi to share experiences and ideas for building local capacity for data sharing and increasing Indian representation in Pediatric Cancer Data Commons consortia as researchers, data contributors, and advisory group members. Our goals for this workshop included:
- to build local capacity in technical data modeling and aggregation, team data science, clinical data standards, data governance processes, and involvement in international clinical research initiatives;
- to increase collaboration between D4CG, the Indian Pediatric Hematology Oncology Group, and Indian institutions; and
- to increase Indian representation in PCDC-affiliated consortia and encourage data sharing and contribution to the commons.
We had a wonderful time meeting and learning from our colleagues and look forward to deepening our collaborations. We are grateful to the dedicated doctors and researchers who took the time to meet with us, and especially thank our coordinators in Mumbai and Delhi, Girish Chinnaswamy and Ramandeep Arora, as well as the UChicago Center in Delhi team.