This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Informatics for fiscal year 2003. The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. These fellowships provide opportunities for interdisciplinary research and educational activities in biology and informatics to a wide range of recent doctoral recipients. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce.
The research and training plan is entitled "Combining genetic and fossil data to reconstruct the ecological, evolutionary and climatic past." This research provides a new way to reconstruct the history of coexisting species by combining population genetic and fossil data into a single Bayesian analysis. This synergistic methodology is being applied to the current range of different types of globally accessible information and will benefit the fields of paleoecology and phylogeography.
