The PHA4GE Infrastructure Working Group was established in December 2019 and concerns itself with the computing infrastructure that underlies data analysis in public health genomics. While the majority of the groups within PHA4GE focus on best practices for data handling and analytic workflows, this working group has its eye on the environment that allows data to be stored and workflows executed in the first place.

We work in times where public health researchers face questions such as, “How much storage and computing infrastructure do we need?”, “Should we invest in local computing infrastructure or should we purchase cloud computing?” and “What human resources does our group need?”. The Infrastructure Working Group aims to provide guidance on best practices with regards to these challenges.

To guide our work, and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are embarking on a survey of the infrastructure of groups engaged in SARS-CoV-2 sequencing in the public health domain. We aim to understand what is working and the challenges facing groups that are engaging in sequencing to support public health response.

Those who are interested in participating in the survey can contact us on [email protected]