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Nature Genetics (2026)
War threatens scientific continuity by severing the mentorship networks that reproduce expertise. The Ukrainian Biological Data Science Summer School, held in person in western Ukraine each year since 2023, shows how distributed training, recursive mentorship and non-extractive international collaboration can preserve biological data science capacity under systemic stress.
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We thank the Uzhhorod National University IT Center for the technical and organizational support that enabled UBDS3. We are grateful to our partners and sponsors, including EMBO, the Zimin Foundation, the International Society for Computational Biology, the Human Frontier Science Program, YURiA-PHARM, Bioinformatics Algorithms, Bioconductor, CRABS and LLO INGENEKO. Their support, expertise and commitment to training and scientific exchange were essential for delivering high-quality instruction and mentoring to participants. We also thank the instructors, mentors, teaching assistants and students whose dedication created a collaborative and productive learning environment.
These authors contributed equally: Taras K. Oleksyk, Serghei Mangul, Fyodor A. Kondrashov.
A full list of members and their affiliations appears in the Supplementary Information.
Department of Biology, Uzhhorod National University, Uzhhorod, Ukraine
Taras K. Oleksyk
Department of Biological Sciences, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA
Taras K. Oleksyk & Walter Wolfsberger
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University, Okinawa, Japan
Lada H. Isakova & Fyodor A. Kondrashov
Department of Technical Support for the Educational Process, Uzhhorod National University, Uzhhorod, Ukraine
Yevheniia Haiovych, Oleksii Kurutsa & Serhii Vronskiy
Bohomoletz Institute of Physiology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine
Borys Olifirov & Oleh Mezhenskyi
Preste, Kyiv, Ukraine
Oleh Mezhenskyi
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany
Anastasiia Horlova & Wolfgang Huber
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Daryna Zavadska
NGO Genomics UA, Kyiv, Ukraine
Valeriia Vasylieva
National Centre for Genomic Analysis (CNAG), Barcelona, Spain
Helena L. Crowell
Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Spain
Roderic Guigó
Małopolska Centre of Biotechnology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Serghei Mangul
Biological and Life Sciences Division, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, Masdar City, United Arab Emirates
Serghei Mangul
Department of Computers, Informatics and Microelectronics, Technical University of Moldova, Chișinău, Moldova
Serghei Mangul
Department of Clinical Pharmacy, Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Serghei Mangul
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Correspondence to Taras K. Oleksyk.
The authors declare no competing interests.
Nature Genetics thanks Beatriz Serrano-Solano and Christopher Tuggle for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Supplementary Figures: Supplementary Fig. 1 | Participation in the UBDS3 Workshop, 2023–2025, and Supplementary Fig. 2 | Recursive mentorship pipeline across UBDS3 editions; Supplementary Tables: Supplementary Table 1 | Overview of the Ukrainian Biological Data Science Summer Schools (UBDS3), 2023–2025; Supplementary Table 2 | UBDS3 2025 Program Schedule: Week 1 (Statistics, Machine Learning & Data Science Foundations); and Supplementary Table 3 | UBDS3 2025 Program Schedule: Week 2 (Research Projects & Career Development); Supplementary Appendices: Supplementary Appendix 1 | Design Principles for a Resilient Biological Data Science Ecosystem; Supplementary Appendix 2 | Program Design, Curriculum, and Institutional Framework of the Ukrainian Biological Data Science Summer School; Supplementary Appendix 3 | Selected Lecture Abstracts; and Supplementary Appendix 4 | Comparison to Established Training Programs and Applicability to Other Capacity-Building Settings; and Supplementary References.
Supplementary Note: UBDS3 Faculty Consortium members
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Oleksyk, T.K., Isakova, L.H., Haiovych, Y. et al. Training as infrastructure for biological data science in wartime Ukraine. Nat Genet (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-026-02702-y
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Nature Genetics (Nat Genet)
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