NIAGADS is honored to be recognized as a an 2026 AWS Higher Education Champion for The University of Pennsylvania!
Since its establishment in 2012, NIAGADS has served the research community by making genetics and genomics data for Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias (ADRD) easier to discover, access, share, and analyze. Over the years, fulfilling that mission has required continual adaptation as technologies, datasets, and scientific questions have changed. The long-standing partnership with AWS has helped NIAGADS scale its infrastructure from 36 exomes and 1.1 TB of data in 2011 to >58,000 whole genomes and >10PB of data today.
“Our mission has always been both to enable research and to be responsible stewards of the data entrusted to NIAGADS,” said Li-San Wang, PhD, Peter C. Nowell, MD Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn. “That means helping researchers discover and use data while maintaining the governance, security, and trust required for responsible data sharing. The AWS recognition reflects many years of work to support both responsibilities.”
That balance between enabling discovery and responsible stewardship is central to NIAGADS’ approach. NIAGADS has evolved from a data repository into an integrated platform designed to support policy-aligned access, responsible reuse, and broad scientific engagement.
As the field continues to evolve, NIAGADS remains committed to serving the Alzheimer’s disease research community—supporting larger and more diverse datasets, new computational and AI-enabled approaches, secure collaboration, and responsible data reuse.
AWS’s recognition highlights the remarkable growth of NIAGADS and Penn’s long-standing use of cloud computing to support genomic research. Today, NIAGADS manages more than 10 petabytes of information and serves validated users around the world via its AWS infrastructure.
For More Information, contact niagads@pennmedicine.upenn.edu
The AWS Higher Education Champions program recognizes institutions using cloud technologies to transform how higher education organizations work with data, deliver services, and support their communities at scale. Penn’s recognition highlights how those same technologies can provide the foundation for global scientific collaboration—helping researchers securely work with extraordinarily large and complex datasets in pursuit of a better understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.