Barend Mons (born 1957,
The Hague
The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital of ...
) is a molecular biologist by training and a leading FAIR data specialist. The first decade of his scientific career he spent on fundamental research on malaria parasites and later on translational research for malaria vaccines. In the year 2000 he switched to advanced data stewardship and (biological) systems analytics. He is currently a professor in Leiden and most known for innovations in scholarly collaboration, especially nanopublications, knowledge graph based discovery and most recently the FAIR data initiative and GO FAIR. Since 2012 he is a Professor in
biosemantics in the Department of Human Genetics at the
Leiden University Medical Center
Leiden University Medical Center (Dutch: ''Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum'') or LUMC is the university hospital affiliated with Leiden University, of which it forms the medical faculty. It is located in Leiden, Netherlands. LUMC is a modern un ...
(LUMC) in The
Netherlands
)
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.
In 2015 Barend was appointed chair of the High Level Expert Group on the
European Open Science Cloud. Since 2017 Barend is heading the International Support and Coordination office of the GO FAIR initiative. He is also the elected president of
CODATA
The Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA) was established in 1966 as the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, originally part of the International Council of Scientific Unions, now part of the International ...
, the standing committee on research data related issues of the International Science Council. Barend is a member of the Netherlands Academy of Technology and Innovation(ACTI). He is also the European representative in the
Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) of the
National Academies of Science
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Natio ...
for engineering and medicine in the USA. Barend is a frequent keynote speaker about FAIR and open science around the world, and participates in various national and international boards.
Education
Mons was awarded a Masters (1981 Cum Laude) and a PhD (1986) from
Leiden University
Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince o ...
on cellular and molecular biology of the malaria parasite ''
Plasmodium berghei
''Plasmodium berghei'' is a species in the genus ''Plasmodium'' subgenus ''Vinckeia''.
It is a protozoan parasite that causes malaria in certain rodents. Originally, isolated from thicket rats in Central Africa, ''P. berghei'' is one of four '' ...
'',
and has worked for more than ten years on the genetic differentiation of
malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects humans and other animals. Malaria causes symptoms that typically include fever, tiredness, vomiting, and headaches. In severe cases, it can cause jaundice, seizures, coma, or death. S ...
parasites and vaccine research, publishing over 45 research articles.
After switching to biosemantics he published some 80 papers on this area, many of them highly cited.
Past career
In 1993 Mons joined the
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...
as a Seconded National Expert with the task to develop and support international scientific networks, especially with developing countries as partners. While at the EC, in the early days of the internet, he pioneered one of the first electronic interactive communication systems for science networking with developing countries, SHARED, for which he started to (co-)design thesaurus-based concept extraction technologies in order to match across languages and jargon. From 1996 to 1999 he served the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (The National Research Council,
NWO) as a senior advisor on International Health Research. After leaving NWO he co-founded the SME Collexis B.V. (later acquired by Elsevier Science) and also started the first Biosemantics Group at the
Erasmus Medical Center
Erasmus University Medical Center (Erasmus MC or EMC) based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, affiliated with Erasmus University and home to its faculty of medicine, is the largest and one of the most authoritative scientific University Medical Centers in ...
in Rotterdam. In addition to his research and teaching responsibilities, Mons has remained involved in international scientific management and networking at various levels. After leaving Collexis in 2005 he co-founded Knewco, Inc. in 2006, and more recently, part of his intellectual legacy was the basis for the founding of the successful SME Euretos, focused on advanced machine learning over machine readable data, now also being used for academic research purposes. From 2008, Barend served as a scientific director of the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre, the predecessor of the current Dutch Techcentre for the Life Sciences (DTL), which he co-founded. DTL was one of the initial supporters of the FAIR data concept. He served as the ‘Integrator for Life Sciences’ in the Netherlands e- Science Center from its inception till 2016, where he was one of the initiators of an early white paper: Data-Stewardship in the Big Data Era: Taking Care of Data (2013). Barend was one of the designers and coordinators of the transformational
Innovative Medicines Initiative
The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is a European initiative to improve the competitive situation of the European Union in the field of pharmaceutical research. The IMI is a joint initiative ( public-private partnership) of the DG Researc ...
(IMI) project known as
Open PHACTS, pioneering the use of semantic technologies, nanopublications and micro-attributions in pharmaceutical biomedical research. From 2013 to 2015 he acted as Head of Node of the Dutch Node in
ELIXIR
ELIXIR (the European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information) is an initiative that will allow life science laboratories across Europe to share and store their research data as part of an organised network. Its goal is to bring t ...
. In 2014, he initiated the FAIR Data initiative
and in 2015 he was appointed Chair of the High Level Expert Group for the European Open Science Cloud. From 2017-2020, he served as the scientific director of the International Support and Coordination Office in the GO FAIR initiative.
Present activities
His present research activities in
LUMC mainly focus on open science, and international knowledge sharing and networking. A more specific aim in his research group is to realise a new form of computer-assisted distributed annotation and learning and on-line knowledge discovery, based on the semantic technologies that his research yielded over the years, including nanopublications. Since 2017 his main task has been to set up and lead the international initiative
Global Open FAIR (GO FAIR), which is aimed at implementing the FAIR guiding principles in order to create an ‘Internet for Machines’ to support open science and innovation. In his capacity of president of
CODATA
The Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA) was established in 1966 as the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, originally part of the International Council of Scientific Unions, now part of the International ...
, he works with an international executive committee to support open science data policies and practices. Barend published the handbook Data Stewardship for Open Science, Implementing FAIR Principles, which is functionally integrated with an on line stewardship wizard. He is currently the Scientific Director of the
GO FAIR Foundation.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mons, Barend
1957 births
Living people
Dutch bioinformaticians
Dutch molecular biologists
Academic staff of Erasmus University Rotterdam
Leiden University alumni
Academic staff of Leiden University
Scientists from The Hague