To create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.
The Equity Working Group (EqWG) promotes and supports progress towards equity in the HCA. The EqWG seeks to engage the global community spanning diverse geographic and ethnic groups to drive inclusive representation and participation, and promote equal benefit from the HCA.
The EqWG’s initial focus is on empowerment to participate in the HCA through outreach, education, and training. The EqWG is co-chaired by Alex K Shalek (shalek@mit.edu), Partha Majumder (parmaj2023@gmail.com) and Musa Mhlanga (musahca@mhlangalab.org).
The HCA Equity Working Group has released several publications and statements on its goals and activities:
This task force will examine issues related to the tracking and sampling of diversity in HCA data. The responsibilities of this Task Force will be to develop recommendations for:
It is important to note that genetics and geography are not the only two elements of human diversity in the context of HCA. However, the Task Force will focus on these two aspects of diversity since they have well established biomedical significance and are potentially amenable to standardization across the HCA, but at the same time raise substantial issues of ethics, equity and prioritization that must be addressed.
The Task Force will be co-chaired by Shyam Prabhakar, Kian Hong Kock and Sophia George. The Chairs will be responsible for reporting the group’s recommendations to the EqWG and (after EqWG approval) other HCA groups including the OC, the Genetic Diversity Biological Network, and the new Data Ecosystem Oversight Group.
Further details are available here.
In 2017 HCA began expanding its outreach and capacity-building efforts and has established four regional networks to date: HCA Asia, HCA Africa, HCA Latin America and HCA Middle East. The goals of the regional networks are to help facilitate scientific and organizational efforts at the regional level.
The regional networks hold annual meetings, as well as arranging ad-hoc workshops, symposia, and other networking events for members. Please see our Events Calendar for an up-to-date list of future and past meetings.
HCA has hosted various training workshops and outreach activities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. We are very grateful to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for their support which has enabled us to run some of the activities listed below.
Training and outreach activities include:
| October 23-27, 2023 | 2023 HCA Latin America Workshop, Santiago, Chile |
| March 07-10, 2023 | HCA Africa 2023 Computational and Experimental Design Workshop, Ghana |
| November 14-16, 2022 | HCA Africa: Introduction to Single Cell RNA-Seq Analysis (re-run) (virtual) |
| October 17-20, 2022 | HCA Africa: Introduction to Single Cell RNA-Seq Analysis (virtual) |
| January 17-22, 2022 | Single Cell Transcriptomics (India, virtual) |
| April 26 – May 7, 2021 | Single Cell RNA-seq Data Analysis Workshop (Latin America, virtual) |
| October 30, 2019 | HCA Equity Meeting, Addis Ababa |
| September 10, 2019 | HCA Equity Roadshow, Brazil |
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, Middle East
John C. Martin Centre for Liver Research & Innovations and Liver Foundation, West Bengal, India
10-12 July 2023
06-07 October 2022
05 October 2022
21-22 March 2022
23 November 2021
15 July 2021
14 July 2021
30-31 October 2019