Dr. Jeffrey Grethe has more than 2 decades of experience in providing collaborative data environments to biomedical researchers in order to advance scientific inquiry leading to new discoveries and treatments of human disorders. Within the Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS; https://crbs.ucsd.edu) at the University of California, San Diego he is the Principal Investigator for the NIDDK Information Network (dkNET; https://dknet.org), which serves the needs of basic and clinical investigators by providing seamless access to large pools of data, information, and resources relevant to the mission of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). dkNET builds on an infrastructure foundation provided by the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF; https://neuinfo.org), where Dr. Grethe, as Principal Invesitgator, led the development of the technical infrastructure. NIF, which provides the largest searchable collection of biomedical resources on the web, is an open source information framework enabling neuroscientists around the world to access a rich virtual environment identifying and providing access to neuroscience-relevant data and resources. Unlike more general search engines, NIF provides deeper access to a more focused set of resources that are relevant to neuroscience, provides search strategies tailored to neuroscience, and also provides access to content that is traditionally “hidden” from web search engines. The infrastructure underlying NIF and dkNET, SciCrunch (https://scicrunch.org), now supports a number of research communities. SciCrunch was designed to allow communities of researchers to create focused portals that provide access to resources, databases, information and tools of relevance to their research areas. This work is being further extended via the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury (ODC-SCI; https://odc-sci.org) and the Open Data Commons for Traumatic Brain Injury (ODC-TBI; https://odc-tbi.org) which are developing a FAIR data platform for spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury researchers and is currently being launched on the extended SciCrunch framework. Most recently, he has become involved with NIH’s SPARC program where he is the Technical Lead for the Curation and Knowledge Management Core (K-Core). K-Core has developed a comprehensive and robust data submission, curation and publication pipeline on top of a core set of standards which have been developed for and approved by the SPARC community. A primary output of K-Core is the SPARC Knowledge Graph - a semantic store that combines information on SPARC datasets annotated according to the SPARC Minimal Information Standard (MIS) with functional and anatomical topologically based connectivity knowledge for the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
Following a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Irvine, he received a doctorate in neurosciences with a focus on neuroinformatics and computational modeling from the University of Southern California. After a post-doc in non-invasive human imaging (PET, MRI, fMRI) at Emory University, Dr. Grethe joined the fMRI Data Center (fMRIDC) at Dartmouth College. At the fMRIDC (http://www.fmridc.org), he was one of the principal members responsible for bringing the Data Center online, the first publicly accessible repository of peer-reviewed fMRI studies. Throughout his career, he has been involved in enabling collaborative research, data sharing and discovery through the application of advanced informatics approaches. This started at USC with his involvement in the Human Brain Project and continues today with his work on NIF, dkNET, SciCrunch, and with standards bodies such as the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (where he is on the Oversight Committee for their Standards and Data Sharing Program). When he transitioned to the University of California, San Diego, he was the Executive Director of BIRN Coordinating Center. As part of the BIRN project he oversaw the deployment of an international collaborative network that supported hundreds of researchers and Terabytes of data spread across more than 30 institutions. Infrastructure from this work in BIRN has been applied to other projects such as the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) project, where he led the transition of the infrastructure to a workflow based analysis platform for metagenomic data. Most recently, he is the UCSD Principal Investigator for a newly funded NIH P41 Biomedical Technology Research Center – the Center for Reproducible Neuroimaging Computation (CRNC) – dedicated to establishing and promoting reproducible neuroimaging research.