When processing health and genetic data in High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, researchers must consider the application of research ethics principles as well as the General Data Protection Regulation, including issues of identifiability, duties of confidentiality and security, and accountability. A Data Protection Impact Assessment can be a useful tool to identify and mitigate any risks to the rights and freedoms of data subjects (patients and research participants). 

In this webinar we will also highlight the risks of working with sensitive data on an HPC cluster and we will provide you guidelines and measures that can help you secure your data and its processing. Additionally, we will give a short overview of what you should look out for when selecting or developing software to work on this data

About the speakers

Sarah Peter studied Bioinformatics and worked for a few years as a researcher and data manager at the Max Planck Institute. Now she works at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, UNILU, as an Infrastructure Engineer in the R3 and IT Infrastructure team. She is also the liaison for the HPC team. Since GDPR has come into effect, she spends some of her time doing risk analysis for the institute’s IT infrastructure and the HPC cluster.

Adrian Thorogood is a lawyer and Research & Development Specialist in the Bioinformatics Core, Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, UNILU. He works with the European 1+ Million Genomes Project and other infrastructure projects to address ethical and legal issues that arise when sharing genomic and health-related data cross-border and internationally. His research focuses on how genomic sequencing platforms, information and networking technologies, open science practices, and patient empowerment movements are disrupting research and health care.