Save the Date for the 2027 FaceBase Community Forum – April 27-28 in Los Angeles
September 30th, 2026
The 2027 FaceBase Community Forum will take place Tuesday, April 27 and Wednesday, April 28, 2027, in Los Angeles, CA (Marina del Rey), hosted at the USC Information Sciences Institute.
Tuesday will be a full day of programming; Wednesday will be a half day. Remote attendance via Zoom will also be available.
This gathering brings together dental, oral, and craniofacial (DOC) researchers, clinicians, and students - as well as those studying related biological systems (such as the ear and hearing research community) - working with FaceBase data and tools. An agenda, registration, and travel details will be announced in the coming months. Check back here or follow the link below for updates.
Check for updates: https://bit.ly/FBForum2027
FaceBase NIH Data Sharing and Reuse Seminar - Nov 13 (online)
September 29th, 2026FaceBase PI Carl Kesselman and technical lead Rob Schuler will present “Building AI-Ready Scientific Data Ecosystems: From FAIR Principles to Intelligent Agent Integration” for the November Data Sharing and Reuse Seminar hosted by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS).
NIH November Data Sharing and Reuse Seminar
Friday, November 13
12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. EDT
Register now
About the seminar
AI-ready science is constrained less by model sophistication than by the shortage of high-quality, well-described data and by infrastructure that cannot keep pace with evolving methods. Drawing on experiences with FaceBase and the Deriva platform across craniofacial, hearing, and ophthalmology research, we argue that FAIR data largely subsumes “AI-ready” data, and that sustainable repositories follow SCALE principles: Self-service curation, domain-Agnostic platforms, Lightweight models, and Evolvable systems.
As large language model agents become the layer through which researchers interact with data, a further question arises: what makes a repository agent-ready? We propose three architectural requirements—documented service interfaces with full coverage, FAIR metadata annotated with community ontologies, and an introspectable data model with an LLM-aligned query interface—and show how an agent built on them can mediate the full research lifecycle, from discovery through citable dataset assembly to curation of results back into the repository, capturing experimental context that artifact-level reproducibility alone cannot.
Seminar details: https://datascience.nih.gov/news/november-data-sharing-and-reuse-seminar-2026
FaceBase Demos at SCGDB – Sept 29 in Seattle, Washington
September 28th, 2026Alejandro Bugacov will be presenting the FaceBase poster and running live demos during Tuesday evening’s poster session at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Craniofacial Genetics and Developmental Biology. Stop by to see what’s new in the repository, learn how to find and download craniofacial datasets, or talk through submitting your own data. Alejandro is also glad to answer questions about requesting access to controlled human subjects data.
FaceBase poster & live demos
Tuesday, September 29 · 5:00-8:00 pm PT
Poster session, SCGDB Annual Meeting
SCGDB meeting details: https://scgdb.org/SCGDB/Scgdb/Annual-Meeting/Annual_Meeting2026.aspx
FaceBase at eScience - Sept 28- Oct 2 in Naples, Italy
September 27th, 2026Every time you search FaceBase, download a dataset, or cite one in a paper, you’re relying on infrastructure that comes out of the research computing community. eScience is one of the places where that community meets. It brings together the people working on how scientific data is managed, shared, and reused across every discipline.
FaceBase PI Carl Kesselman and technical lead Rob Schuler are among the most active contributors this year. They have five presentations over the week. The common thread is a question our community is already facing: as AI tools become part of everyday research, how do we keep results reproducible, keep track of where data came from, and make sure datasets stay findable and reusable? This work helps shape how FaceBase supports your research, now and as it evolves.
Monday, September 28 · Presentation
From Ad Hoc to Reproducible: A Capability Uplift Program for Biomedical AI Research (lightning talk) Beyond the Session Boundary: Three Traces of Provenance in an Agent-Mediated Science Deployment (workshop paper)
Wednesday, September 30 · Poster & Demo Session
CASTER: A Lightweight On-Ramp to Continuous FAIRness for Small-Team Machine Learning
Thursday, October 1 · Invited talk
Reproducible and Wrong: Agentic eScience Needs a Scientific Method
Friday, October 2 · Paper
From Discovery to Publication: Toward Agent-Mediated Research Lifecycles
eScience program details: https://www.escience-conference.org/2026/timetable
New release: Altered muscle development in Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome macroglossia
September 15th, 2026FaceBase has released a new dataset from the Kalish Lab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) containing bulk RNA sequencing data from muscle stem cells (satellite cells) isolated from the tongues of children with and without Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (BWS). BWS is an overgrowth disorder caused by genetic and epigenetic changes on chromosome 11p15, and an enlarged tongue (macroglossia) is one of its most common features. By comparing cells from two molecular subtypes of BWS with nonsyndromic controls as they develop into skeletal muscle, these data can help researchers identify the molecular pathways behind altered tongue muscle development in BWS macroglossia.
Contributors: Elisia D. Tichy, Jennifer M. Kalish (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia)
Description:
This dataset contains very low input bulk RNA-seq data from tongue-derived satellite cells. Human pediatric samples include nonsyndromic controls and two BWS molecular subtypes: IC2 LOM (loss of methylation at imprinting control region 2) and pUPD11 (paternal uniparental disomy of chromosome 11). After FACS isolation of satellite cells (defined as CD45-/CD324-/CD56+/CD82+), cells were plated in myoblast growth media for 6 days and then switched to differentiation media for 2 days.
Libraries were prepared from 5 ng of total RNA and sequenced paired-end on an Illumina NovaSeq X. The dataset includes FASTQ files (4 per sample) for 3 controls, 3 BWS IC2 LOM, and 3 BWS pUPD11 samples.
Supported by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (award R01DE033646).
Accessing the data
This is restricted-access human data (data use limitation: General Research Use). To gain access, you must first complete the process outlined here.
Explore the dataset in the FaceBase Data Browser
FaceBase Dataset:
Elisia D Tichy, Jennifer M Kalish. Gene expression patterns in pediatric tongue-derived satellite cells during differentiation (Bulk RNAseq). FaceBase Consortium https://doi.org/10.25550/A5-VYP4 (2026).
Associated Publication:
Elisia D Tichy, Anna T Nguyen, Mariah A Byrne, Rose D Pradieu, Gavriela Kalish-Schur, Mara Fallon, Snehal Nirgude, Darryl Kinnear, Harry P Kozakewich, Jennifer M Kalish. Myogenic dysregulation underlies human tongue overgrowth in Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome. iScience 29(10), 117575 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.117575 (2026).