IBEST - funding

IBEST faculty have secured research funding from a variety of sources from Federal agencies to private industry. This generous support has allowed IBEST to expand its research programs and to form a new interdisciplinary graduate degree offering in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB). The first class of graduate students in the BCB program began fall 2003.

The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is a joint program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and several U.S. states and territories. The program promotes the development of the states' science and technology (S&T) resources through partnerships involving a state's universities, industry, and government, and the Federal research and development (R&D) enterprise. EPSCoR operates on the principle that aiding researchers and institutions in securing Federal R&D funding will develop a state's research infrastructure and advance economic growth. EPSCoR's goal is to maximize the potential inherent in a state's S&T resources and use those resources as a foundation for economic growth.

A variety of programs in computer science and biology are funded by this project. One project uses genetic programming, which uses simulated evolution to produce computer software, to build a computer program that repairs itself when damaged and that tolerates faults with high reliability. A second project was to construct a Beowulf cluster supercomputer. This machine connects personal computers into one large, extremely powerful multiprocessing supercomputer. There were two biology-related projects. One project studies phylogeography and investigates the relationships between the evolutionary history of species and the geography in which those species live. The other study investigates the genomic distibution of one type of human transposable element, using both simulations and the human genome database. Transposable elements are fragments of DNA that move about in the genome without apparently contributing anything to the organism in which they occur. Funds in this award were also used to begin recruiting a senior Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics.

COBRE is an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). COBRE awards provide funding for multidisciplinary teams to develop faculty biomedical research expertise and competitiveness within a thematic research focus of their choosing.

UI Center for Research on Processes in Evolution (CRePE)

Director: Larry Forney, Ph.D., Head Department of Biological Sciences
The research cores are in molecular biology and bioinformatics, and in structural biology, with four projects. This program will bring together expertise in evolutionary biology, structural biology, molecular biology, ecology, computational biology, genetic programming, and statistics. The goal is to investigate the relative importance of mutagenic processes on the time course and direction of adaptive evolution. Computational approaches will be developed to improve understanding of evolutionary history of functional domains in proteins, genes and genomes. Insights into the mechanisms of genetic variation and adaptive evolution, and how they shape phenotypic characteristics, may provide fundamental information in biomedical science. This program will support five junior to mid-level researchers and eight senior faculty in positions of research leadership, collaboration, or administration, with plans to recruit more junior and senior faculty

BRIN is an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). BRIN awards provide the opportunity for planning and implementing a network to significantly enhance the biomedical research capacities of participating institutions. BRIN research themes are blends of federal and state priorities. BRIN is the biomedical analogue of the National Science Foundation's EPSCoR program.

The BRIN grant allows the three Idaho universities to enhance research opportunities for scientists and students. The University of Idaho administers the program. The BRIN emphasizes three main objectives: Establish a bioinformatics network among the three Idaho schools, provide new educational facilities at all three institutions, and most importantly, the NIH BRIN grant provides funds for undergraduate and graduate students to do research with the goal of educating the next generation of researchers for Idaho's industry and universities. This grant helped to fund the computer hardware and software that are available to the IBEST community as well as the staff that supports these facilities.

BRIN provided funds to the IBEST Beowulf Facility. The purpose of this facility is to provide high performance computing capacity for analysis of evolutionary models and biological data.

For more information regarding the Beowulf super computer or IBEST, please contact James Foster at foster@cs.uidaho.edu

Provides access to state of the art database and data storage facilities (Purchased Raid Servers).

Helped support the construction of the Classroom Training Center for faculty and students.

Generously donated over 16 gigabytes of SDRAM memory to the IBEST Beowulf project.

Donated $25,000 of Intel processors.