News & Events

We've launched our website refresh and new docs site! (21 June 2023)

We are excited to present our newly updated website, designed after usability testing with consultant group, Interface Guru, led by Cia Romano. Explore the following features to enhance your FaceBase experience and if you have any comments, feedback or suggestions, please send them to help@facebase.org:

• Keyword Search on the Homepage: Find information quickly and effortlessly with our keyword search functionality, right from the the big search field on the homepage.

• Informative Charts: Gain insights into the breadth and depth of data available on FaceBase through visually appealing charts. The homepage displays the number of subjects per species as well as Experiment Types per species.

• Welcome page: New to FaceBase? Please go to our new Welcome page which provides some great starting points for exploring what FaceBase has to offer.

• Updated navigation: Please look at the menu at the top of the website and its new organization, centered around the following: Data (the lifeblood of FaceBase is the sharing of data, Resources (showcasing additional resources provided by the FaceBase Community), Contribute (describing the process of preparing and contributing your data for sharing on FaceBase), Policies (describing our data policies, especially for controlled-access data), Community (learn about FaceBase and the many ways you can participate at Forums, Office Hours and more!) and Help (with FAQs, citing information, and pointers to documentation and videos).

• Organism-Specific Resource Pages: We understand the significance of organism-specific resources in your work. Our revamped website now offers dedicated resource pages for three major organisms - including charts displaying breadth and depth of data available, internally hosted resources and external resources: mouse, human, and zebrafish.

• New Documentation Site: As part of our commitment to providing comprehensive support, we have launched our new documentation site at docs.facebase.org. This site serves as a valuable hub for all your technical queries, FAQs, and helpful guides. Access the knowledge base to navigate FaceBase effectively and leverage its full potential in your research endeavors.

Remember, if you have any comments, feedback or suggestions, please send them to help@facebase.org or fill out the Feedback Form. We want facebase.org to be a living and evolving resource for you and we are always learning how to serve the dental, oral and craniofacial research community.

Thank you for a successful FaceBase Community Forum! (16 June 2023)

We are so grateful for such a successful FaceBase Community Forum! Cheers to the following participants who provided such insights and inspiration and made the meeting so special:

Speakers and Moderators

Here are the speakers and moderators that made this meeting so rich in knowledge-sharing - Bios of Speakers and Moderators:

Speakers: Rena D’Souza, Director of NIDCR (NIH/NIDCR); Mary Marazita (Univ of Pittsburgh); Jin Xiao (Univ of Rochester); Olivier Duverger (NIH/NIDCR); Abimbola Oladayo (Univ of Iowa); Jay Patel (Temple University); Harrison Brand (Harvard University); Ross Whitaker (Univ of Utah); Gage Crump (USC); Hong Li (Univ of Colorado, School of Dental Medicine); Crystal Rogers (UC Davis); Alicia Chou (NIH/NIDCR) and Noffisat Oki (NIH/NIDCR). We’d also like to give a shout out to our Hub presenters: Yang Chai, Carl Kesselman, Rob Schuler, Alejandro Bugacov, and Laura Pearlman (University of Southern California).

Moderators: For the Clinical and Public Health Session: Pedro Sanchez (Cedars-Sinai) and Emile Vieta (UCLA). For the Data Science Session: Joseph Hacia (University of Southern California) and Jifan Feng (University of Southern California). For the Basic Research Session: Jimmy Hu (UCLA) and Stacy Nguyen (Boston College).

Poster Presenters

You can find abstracts and contats for the publicly available posters here. Our amazing presenters from our poster session are: Emmanuel Aladenika (University of Iowa), Allyn Auslander (Operation Smile), Rucha Bapat (University of Southern California), Jifan Feng (University of Southern California), Tingwei Guo (University of Southern California), Eva Janeckova (University of Southern California), Mengmeng Liu (University of Southern California), Fei Pei (University of Southern California), Frankie Wilke (Indiana University - Purdue University), Mingyi Zhang (University of Southern California) and Heliya Ziaei (University of Southern California).

Program Committee

We would also like to express our appreciation to the Program Committee who helped us put together the best FaceBase Community Forum yet! All of our thanks go to: Rucha Arun Bapat (University of Southern California), Harrison Brand (Harvard), Azeez Butali (University of Iowa), Joseph Hacia (University of Southern California), Erica Hutchins (University of California San Francisco), Stacy Nguyen (Boston College), Pedro Sanchez (Cedars-Sinai), Susan Walsh (Indiana University - Purdue University) and Katherine Weisensee (Clemson University)

The FaceBase Hub thanks all of the above and all of those who joined us - both in person and virtually. More materials from the meeting will be distributed to the public very soon. And we’re already looking forward to getting together again in 2024!

Registration is open for the FaceBase Community Forum on Tuesday, June 13th! (09 May 2023)

We’re excited to announce that registration is now open for the 3rd Annual FaceBase Community Forum!

This year’s Forum promises to be a unique opportunity for the craniofacial research community to come together and share knowledge. The event will be held both in-person at the HSC Conference Center at University of Southern California in Los Angeles and virtually via Zoom on Tuesday, June 13th.

The agenda includes an impressive lineup of special invited talks, a panel, learning about how FaceBase can help comply with the new NIH Data Management Sharing plans and a poster session. Whether you’re joining us in-person or remotely, you’ll have access to engaging discussions and opportunities to interact with other members of the community.

Visit our event page to learn more about the exciting happenings at this year’s FaceBase Community Forum and to register today!

Application For Data And Technology Advancement National Service Scholar Program Is Open (29 March 2023)

Here is notice of an important program from NIDCR that our users may be interested in:

The Data and Technology Advancement (DATA) National Service Scholar Program, organized by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS), seeks and supports experienced data and computer scientists and engineers to tackle challenging biomedical data problems with the potential for substantial public health impact. Each year, projects are selected from proposals submitted by NIH institutes for the applicants to apply for. NIDCR’s project is among the 13 that are selected this year.

Application for the Program is now open here. The due date is May 15, 2023. Please help spread the word among your networks to help NIDCR to attract strong and interested candidates.

Introducing the EnamelBase resource (13 March 2023)

FaceBase is excited to introduce EnamelBase hosted by FaceBase, a sharing site for data, tools, and resources to accelerate scientific and technical progress in studying a multi-stage process of dental enamel formation called amelogenesis.

Tools and resources are available now and coming soon at https://www.facebase.org/resources/enamelbase/, including:

• Mouse Models: 20+ mutant, conditional-ready, Cre-driver, and reporter models available at MMRRC.
• In vitro bioreactor: A 3D co-culture system for the expansion and maintenance of ameloblast-like cells
• Protocols: To support secondary use of models and generation of enamel-focused datasets
• Multiple Data Types: Morphological, biochemical, histological, biophysical, high-resolution structural images, and multi-scale omics data