FaceBase 4

Dental, Oral and Craniofacial health (DOC) plays a significant factor in the overall well-being of the population. About half of all birth defects are associated with craniofacial malformations. Many other genetic conditions manifest themselves via phenotypes in the face and skull and are associated with communication disorders, neurological development and other factors. Furthermore, oral health plays a significant role in overall human health.

Driven by the importance of DOC research to overall human health, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) established the FaceBase Consortium in 2009 to advance research relevant to the NIDCR mission by creating comprehensive datasets of craniofacial development and dysmorphologies in order to disseminate these datasets to the wider craniofacial research community and support reuse of data for new research projects and collaborations. Since its creation, FaceBase has become a central data repository resource funded for dental and craniofacial researchers.

We propose to build on the success of FaceBase to date to 1) expand our community outreach, training, and education resources by fostering an active community of users across the translational spectrum of Dental, Oral and Craniofacial (DOC) research and related disciplines trained in use of FaceBase, 2) enhance FaceBase services to efficiently serve a growing community ranging from single investigators to multi-consortia, and empower scientists across the translational spectrum of DOC research and other relevant health studies to advice their research using FAIR, TRUSTworthy, scientifically robust, data-driven, and AI/ML/DL-ready resources, and 3) build on our robust and agile project management structure to meet the new requirements of the extended use cases and community envisioned by this proposal.