Nicolas Delhomme

From January 1, 2026, I am the coordinator of the WIFORCE data support centre (DSC). In my new role I am SLU's contact person within the HPC2N consortium, the local supercomputer centre in Umeå, and a member of FIK-S (the Committee for Research Infrastructure at the Faculty of Forest Science) and the SciLifeLab Site Umeå steering group. I have also recently been assigned to join Umeå University's (UmU) working group for research data storage. All these appointments are very relevant to meeting the challenges that my new position entails.

The goals of DSC are:

• Enable increased collaboration across disciplines and between academia and industry with shared data, models and software tools.
• A support function that lowers the thresholds to meet future needs in the forest sector regarding both research and industry.
• Our researchers are not computer scientists/programmers but forest scientists/ecologists/geneticists – so a support must be able to “talk to farmers in a farmers’ way and the scholars in Latin”.
• Long-term construction of a knowledge centre/support centre to develop AI-based tools.
• Education of the next generation of forest researchers – Master of Science in Engineering!
• The growth, biodiversity and carbon storage models that are developed will be absolutely central to industry planning, Swedish and European authorities and forest research.

To succeed in DSC’s construction, I bring with me the experience I have accumulated during my career.

Until the end of 2025, I led the bioinformatics platform that I founded at the Umeå Plant Science Centre (UPSC), a collaboration between SLU and UmU, almost ten years ago. I have managed to establish it as a central research platform at UPSC and the number of employees on the platform has grown from one to four since 2016. In the last year, the platform had a budget of two and a half million SEK and a turnover of more than one million SEK, which was enough to support one employee. I managed to do this with the support of UPSC’s research and infrastructure grant but also co-financing I received through collaboration with national infrastructure platforms, for example with NGI: the National Genomics Infrastructure. By the end, I was responsible for the service, support and training that the platform offers researchers at the forefront of bioinformatics.

Although I enjoyed the work, it became routine work for the most part. Through good project management and good recruitment, I had managed to free up time that I used to establish closer collaboration with local and national infrastructures, for example for data storage and computing capacity. That network is very relevant to meet the challenges that DSC faces.

Regarding data storage, the platform now handles a large part of the data generated at UPSC where I established a data solution that is scalable, secure and cost-effective for the coming years, but as the need for storage explodes, I was contacted by SLU's strategist for research data management and together we are now having a discussion with national players (UPPMAX and HPC2N data centres) to secure SLU's future research data archiving needs. Although the handling of WIFORCE data is my priority, the solution I am designing and testing is seen as a pilot project by both SLU and UmU, a reason why I was invited to contribute to UmU's working group for research data storage.

Another example of collaboration is our ongoing work to move part of the platform's computing capacity to HPC2N, as they have established a solution that lowers the threshold for new users to learn to use high-performance computing resources. These initiatives led to me being invited to be part of the steering group for research infrastructure at SLU's Faculty of Forestry (FIK-S) and the steering group for SciLifeLab Site Umeå at UmU.

Something that I lacked in my previous work was having a long-term goal, something that is also relevant to society. One reason I applied for the WIFORCE coordinator position was to be part of a more concrete strategy for climate management. Another was to meet the exciting challenge of mapping existing data and resources, understanding data analysis processes across disciplines, curating and annotating data, building predictive models using AI, and last but not least developing and maintaining collaboration with many different actors and stakeholders at the university, in industry and governmental authorities. In principle, it is the same as what I did for the platform but with more immediate effect where the results and models will influence the forest industry, make decision-making around forest management more scientifically based, give Sweden a leading position in forestry, as well as inform and influence European climate policy. Being a part of all this is incredibly exciting.

In addition to helping researchers with their bioinformatics needs, I led the platform with its core competencies in genomics to use UPSC's large-scale data to develop new methods for gene network inference that included using artificial intelligence to mine them and apply them to complex multi-omics datasets. The collaboration skills I learned will be even more important within DSC to achieve its goal of applying interdisciplinary research.

In education, I have pioneered a mentoring system that was later adopted by NBIS (National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden, part of SciLifeLab). In the system, a PhD student or postdoc from a research group collaborates with a collaborator of the platform on the project. There are only advantages to this method. The project lasts the same length of time, but the student also learns data analysis and the results are more detailed thanks to their biological knowledge. The platform is also involved in advanced university courses and has been a good tool for attracting students with skilled computer science skills to UPSC. Last but not least, I worked for a good local collaboration between the platform and the national bioinformatics support at NBIS. That network will be of great value in supporting the next generation of forest scientists enrolled in WIFORCE's doctoral school.

I really enjoy learning about pedagogy and applying it in my daily work. I completed the docent training offered by SLU's EPU between 2016 and 2020 and have kept up to date since then. I have directly supervised over 20 master's students and was an assistant supervisor for 5 doctoral students.

Over the past ten years, the platform has had more than 300 projects, the vast majority of which involved training postdoctoral or doctoral students in data analysis with an average of 15 hours per project.

This interest will continue to support me in delivering high-quality support to the WIFORCE projects.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”, Nelson Mandela, July 16th, 2003