This award provides support for a three year continuing award, a renewal of the NIBIB-NSF Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institutes (BBSI) Program, entitled, Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology Summer Institute (CSBSI) at Iowa State University (ISU) under the direction of Dr. Robert Jernigan. The Departments of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology, Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, Statistics, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Plant Pathology, and the Laurence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics (BCBBS) at ISU will continue to host the previously funded NIH-NSF Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology Summer Institute and host a nine week summer education and research program for three years. The Institute will support 15 upper level undergraduates and lower-level graduate students each summer for a total of 45 students throughout the duration of the award.
The intellectual merit of this program lies in its goal is to introduce upper level undergraduate and lower level graduate students to the use of computer science, statistics and mathematics in answering systems-wide biological questions emerging in integrated biology. The wider goal is to give these students the ability to identify and tackle important research problems in computational and systems biology and to encrouage them to pursue careers in these fields. The institute will feature a two week intensive instructional course focusing on genomics, bioinformatics, and computational biology with applications to genetics, molecular biology, and systems biology.
The broader impacts of the CSBSI will be demonstrated in its ability to increase the pool of trained people in bioinformatics and computational biology by instructing students in the fundamentals of systems and computational biology, providing extended research experiences, and by training other academics so that they can instruct their students in these subjects. The course materials, laboratory projects and other didactic materials developed by the investigators for use in the Institute will be freely available to engineers, scientists and educators over the Internet. The project team will also use this material to offer tutorials and workshops at conferences and to give lectures at selected 4-year colleges.
This program is being co-funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO)/Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI)/Plant Genome Research Program, the Directorate for Engineering (ENG)/Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), and the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).
