The CaST Outreach Core program will produce palpable outcomes that foster and invigorate our investigators, our science, and our communities. Its mission will be accomplished through aims to support CaST research: First, DREAM challenges will be coordinated to encourage community-wide, innovative analysis of the novel datasets produced by CaST. Cancer systems biology infers networks of interactions of cellular components from next-generation biological data. However, issues related to the quality and types of data generated and to the predictive efficacy of the algorithms need to be addressed in systematic and unbiased ways. The Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods (DREAM) program (co-founded by Dr. Califano) was designed for this purpose and is an established leader in open science, crowdsourcing challenges. Second, CaST investigators will participate in structured, in-depth opportunities to learn new, complementary skills related to CaST objectives. Such cross-training will allow investigators to think more holistically and critically about their research. Larger-scale cross-training programs will be established throughout Columbia, and personnel will be exchanged with other CSBC centers. An annual one-day workshop for the Columbia biomedical community will be offered in collaboration with the Precision Medicine Initiative. Third, the Systems Biology Discussion Group at the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), which was established by Dr. Califano, will be transformed into a CSBC seminar/discussion series. These biannual events will be open to the scientific community and will consist of thematic talks, followed by a closed-door, focused inquiry session to address the knowledge and technology gaps related to the science presented at the general meeting. At each event, a senior investigator from another CSBC center will be invited as the key note speaker and as a short-term visiting scientist at CaST. Fourth, CaST information will be disseminated through a center website (Web CaST), a quarterly newsletter, a yearly report, and community-based activities. To enable the wide-spread sharing of CaST's products, CaST software and data resources will be annotated and published using the Biositemaps Editor. Biositemaps is a mechanism from the NIH National Centers of Biomedical Computing for open broadcast and retrieval of meta- data about biomedical resources. In addition, through the CaST Scholars program, CaST personnel will target, train, and mentor budding scientists from underrepresented groups. Each summer, two undergraduate interns from the Colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY) system will be hosted, and, each year, pre- professional women will be invited to become mentees through CaST's involvement with the Scientista Foundation. Involving students in an interdisciplinary academic/research environment early in their careers is an effective mechanism to inspire the next generation of cancer systems biology researchers.
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