Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core (HBC): 2025 Highlights
As 2025 comes to a close, we find ourselves reflecting on a year shaped by uncertainty, transition, and resilience. The shifting political and funding landscape presented real challenges, and as a community we felt the weight of those changes. Yet through change, we also saw renewed commitment to our mission and to one another.
We said goodbye to cherished colleagues whose contributions have left a lasting mark on the bioinformatics core: Associate Director, Meeta Mistry (11 years), Zhu Zhuo (6 years), Maria Simoneau (5 years), and Heather Wick (2 years). We also celebrated new opportunities for Alexandra Bartlett as a Senior Scientist at Deep Genomics and Upendra Bhattarai as Senior Data Scientist at Brown University. We are deeply grateful for the legacies they leave behind and for the strength of the community they helped build.
Amid the transitions, 2025 had many bright moments that reaffirmed the impact of our work.
We trained 234 learners across 13 multi‑day workshops and offered 11 short modules through our Current Topics in Bioinformatics Series. This year brought an exciting expansion of our curriculum, including a Spatial Transcriptomics Nanocourse, a collaboration with the HMS Single Cell Core and the Core for Computational Biomedicine (CCB); a new “Generative AI for Exploratory Data Analysis” module led by Derrick Deconti (QBRC); and a week‑long Cells To Insights bootcamp pairing introductory R with scRNA‑seq analysis.
Our Platforms team transitioned the core to using Nextflow and nf-core pipelines, and launched bcbioR, a set of analysis templates containing guidelines with best practices for applications of high throughput sequencing. Using these new tools, our bioinformaticians supported data analysis for 177 projects across Harvard and affiliated institutions, and coauthored 18 manuscripts – each one a testament to meaningful scientific partnership.
While 2025 tested us in many ways, it also revealed the strength, adaptability, and generosity of the people who make the core and this community what it is. We move into 2026 with gratitude for our collaborators, pride in our accomplishments, and optimism for the year ahead.
