At the end of February, the global members of the Monarch Initiative convened at the Jackson Laboratory in Farmington, Connecticut for our annual All-Hands Meeting. This collaborative meeting allowed us to set goals for 2017, have hands-on working time for various projects, bond over an epic Hibachi meal, and compete in giant Jenga. Since the Monarch team works around the globe, the All-Hands Meeting was a unique chance for everyone to gather in the same room. As a new member to the team, I particularly enjoyed meeting the rest of my coworkers in person - instead of over video chat! The meeting was a big success, yet it ended on a dramatic note when several of our flights were canceled, resulting in three-hour-long taxi rides and an impromptu trip to Waffle House. In this post I will mention some of the highlights from the meeting as well as the goals we discussed for the upcoming year and how these goals fit into three main themes: ontologies, tools, and collaborations.  

To celebrate Open Data Day 2017 , I want to highlight one of the Monarch Initiative ’s innovative data sharing tools: the PhenoPacket . At Monarch we playfully refer to the PhenoPacket concept as a “bag of phenotypes” to describe patients. If you aren’t a researcher or clinician, you are probably wondering what a “phenotype” is. A phenotype can be simply defined as the patient signs and symptoms associated with a disease, or more technically defined as the physical manifestation of the combined effects of a person’s genes and their environment. PhenoPackets are a novel way to systematically organize and share the data associated with a patient’s phenotypes. Currently, data about a patient’s phenotypes is collected by doctors and researchers and can be found in publications, databases, electronic health records, clinical trials, and even social media. This wide variation in data creation leads to diverse data that is not standardized or in a central location, so it is very difficult