Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Interdisciplinary Informatics are sponsored jointly by the Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Biological Sciences (BIO) to encourage research and training that cross the traditional disciplinary boundaries between them. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients (biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and others). It is expected that the Fellows trained through these fellowships will play an important role in training the future workforce. Postdoctoral research and training in informatics will permit junior scientists trained in biology, mathematical, chemical, and physical sciences to play key roles in developing new quantitative tools and methods that will advance informatics in biology and other fields.
The research and training plan is entitled "Delineating the genetic and molecular architecture of quantitative traits through gene expression profiling." The goal of this project is to characterize the genetic architecture of gene expression levels in yeast using functional genomic, bioinformatic, and statistical tools. Particular emphasis is being given to multivariate and informatics based approaches that move beyond identifying marginal gene effects to efficiently explore, model, and identify epistatic and pleiotropic quantitative trait loci.
