BEAR User Groups

If you are using an aspect of the BEAR services you are probably not alone. Setting up a Special Interest Group is a good way of getting and receiving peer group support, often from people outside of your research area. Any BEAR-related service is a candidate for a SIG, and could include:

• Application specific groups, such as Abaqus (finite-element structural analysis) or Ansys CFX and Fluent (computational fluid dynamics)
• Domain specific groups such as *Omics with specialist resources such as Galaxy and GATK
• Programming languages, including parallel code development

Offers to help in or lead any of these subgroups would be welcomed by the BEAR User Group Chair, Dr. Dietmar Heinke (school of Psychology) (d.g.heinke@bham.ac.uk).

In 2019 we launched an exciting new initiative to help spread the word about BEAR Services and now have a team of BEAR Champions with at least  one per College. Have you found BEAR services have helped you in your research? Do you want to help others get access to the secure storage and fast data processing available? Have the BEAR Software group helped you to write code? Do you know people who are not aware of us?

We are looking for staff and research students at the University of Birmingham who would like to volunteer to become BEAR Champions within their School/Institute and potentially College to provide local expertise about BEAR services. BEAR Champions  also provide an important feedback route to the BEAR team. They  represent the interests of users from various areas and help us to prioritise developments to the service by identifying areas of common concern. Please see our blog post for more details.