This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY 2006. 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. 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 for this fellowship is entitled "The ecology and joint evolution of hosts and parasites in nature." This project is a study of how processes at different scales, from individuals to landscapes, combine to determine spatiotemporal host-parasite dynamics. It includes developing epidemiological models incorporating ecological and evolutionary processes and then applies these models to two different empirical systems: Daphnia dentifera and a fungal pathogen, and pea aphids and their parasitoid Aphidius ervi.
The training goals are to learn how to construct spatially explicit time-series models and the statistical techniques necessary to link these models to data. Further, the Fellow is broadening her expertise to terrestrial agricultural systems, providing a greater diversity of options for future research, and improving teaching skills in a program for undergraduates at the biology-mathematics interface.
