New 5-year strategic plan outlines how the JGI will advance the bioeconomy, leveraging partnerships to advance foundational science, creating opportunities for the global research community.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) has released its newest 5-Year Strategic Plan: Innovating Genomics to Serve the Changing Planet (download a copy at jointgeno.me/2024StrategicPlan.) This plan aligns the DOE Office of Science user facility with broader national efforts to promote and stimulate a bioeconomy, where renewable, biological resources drive processes, products, and services.
Advancing the bioeconomy will provide a wide range of benefits, but it also requires a deep understanding of biological systems. The JGI strategic plan lays out how users and the global research community will bridge fundamental knowledge gaps to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing.
As a leader in genomics for bioenergy and environmental solutions, the JGI is well-positioned to provide users with capabilities to create genomics-enabled insights into a vast range of organisms and ecosystems. These kinds of data could open opportunities along multiple avenues, including agriculture, climate modeling, novel bioproducts, and environmental remediation—all priorities identified by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program.
In service of solutions that will impact society, the 2024 strategic plan introduces the JGI’s new vision to lead genomic innovation for a sustainable bioeconomy. To accomplish this vision, an updated mission statement for the user facility sets out to support the global research community with advanced genomic capabilities, large scale data, and professional expertise while responsibly managing people and resources.
| Hear JGI Director Nigel Mouncey detail how the strategic plan came together. |
“The plan looks toward exciting new directions in science, technology and data science for the JGI,” noted JGI Deputy for Science Axel Visel, “and we’ll continue to build on existing strengths to accomplish this vision.” Over a year and a half, Visel drove the effort, comprised of holding JGI-internal leadership and planning workshops, as well as collecting extensive input from all JGI staff, Biosciences and Berkeley Lab leadership, JGI advisory committees, and its primary funders at BER. “Under our well-established user facility model, we expect to offer our user community an exciting range of new tools and capabilities to support their scientific investigations of biological and environmental systems.”
The user facility’s new plan goes beyond outlining a broad vision and multiple scientific, technological, and operational themes and objectives for the next five years. It also includes more than 130 implementation milestones to help track and drive progress toward the overarching goals and vision. The plan considers the opportunities arising from leveraging laboratory and computational technologies at scale, improving connectivity across the DOE data ecosystem, building and harnessing partnerships, enhancing the JGI’s impact through communication, and maximizing stewardship of DOE resources. This approach, combining a forward-looking vision with a detailed implementation path, has previously proven successful; in the 2018-2023 five-year strategic plan, the JGI accomplished 90% completion of the two- and five-year milestones.
Strategic themes and initiatives of the JGI strategic plan
“We will continue to be a user facility that provides genomic capabilities. We specialize in doing this at scale, providing our users not just with data, but offering expertise and resources to help them turn these data into insights and knowledge in support of the DOE science mission. Additionally, we will continue to focus on stewardship for the taxpayer money that we are getting, managing our people and resources responsibly,” said JGI Director Nigel Mouncey. “In creating or contributing to the data resources needed for the bioeconomy, we are engaging with diverse and new user communities. And everything that we do will continue to be aimed at supporting the global user community that does science. What we do goes far beyond supporting those users who work with the JGI through approved proposals; there’s a much larger community of people who use JGI-produced data for purposes that support our scientific mission.”
Strategic Plan Highlights:
- Nutrient cycling theme. Advancing the JGI’s ability to predict and respond to biogeochemical cycles, which builds on the DOE’s interest in mitigating climate change. These insights will help develop sustainable solutions for bioproducts to support the bioeconomy.
- Functional diversity theme. Reading the genomes of individual organisms or environmental DNA, and then using advanced capabilities to understand their inner workings to advance biotechnology and biomanufacturing.
- Data and connectivity theme. Standardizing and streamlining the JGI’s data systems and tools, as well as interweaving those efforts into a wider DOE data ecosystem. Increasingly, agencies are emphasizing data integration to support the exploration of new, cross-domain research questions.
- Stewarding resources theme. Evolving and growing the JGI workforce and culture simultaneously with the scientific and technological advances. As responsible stewards of public resources, the JGI also aims to efficiently operate, effectively communicate the achievements enabled through collaborative partnerships, and help cultivate new user communities.
- Biomolecular materials initiative. Pairing the JGI’s genomic capabilities with the advanced analytical capabilities of The Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility also located at Berkeley Lab, to understand how biomaterials are made and improve them.
- Biosurveillance and biopreparedness initiative. Leveraging the JGI’s expertise to grow in areas such as developing pathogen-agnostic detection and prediction strategies for types of as-yet unknown pathogens. The JGI’s advanced data integration and models can be applied toward understanding how climate change might contribute to the emergence of new pathogens.
“By sharing our vision broadly across Berkeley Lab, with other user facilities, and with JGI users, we aim to foster awareness and collaboration in support of our goals,” said Mouncey. “Creating transparency about our efforts is critical for enabling complementary and synergistic efforts across the Berkeley Lab Biosciences Area and with other user facilities in support of BER mission research. We encourage you to read through it, provide us feedback and to help us calibrate progress toward our near- and long-term goals.”
2024-2029 JG Strategic Plan: Fast Download PDF | Print Quality PDF