Proposal Title: High-Capacity Cyber-Connectivity to the Jewelry District Campuses in Providence, RI
Institution: Brown University
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The Rhode Island (RI) Research Infrastructure Improvement Inter-Campus and Intra-Campus Cyber Connectivity project will provide high speed connection and thus facilitate effective collaboration among Rhode Island's institutions of higher education. Brown University's extended campus locations will gain high speed access to the computing facilities in the main campus. Other public universities and 2-and 4-year colleges will be connected to Brown University's research and computing facilities through the Ocean State Higher Education Economic Development and Administrative Network (OSHEAN). Upgrades to OSHEAN will strengthen collaborations of the North East Cyberinfrastructure Consortium comprising of institutions from Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, and Delaware and also improve connectivity to New York and Massachusetts. The RI Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which facilitates interaction among researchers and entrepreneurs, will also receive high bandwidth connectivity through the upgrades in this project.
Intellectual Merit The RI Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (RI-EPSCoR) focuses on studies of climate change effects on marine organisms, ecosystems, and food webs. These studies are fundamentally important to the global biosphere and locally to Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay. The high bandwidth connection provided by this project will facilitate efficient transmission and sharing of data among researchers across RI to make full use of NextGen DNA sequencing technologies and bioinformatics tools. Integrative metagenomic approaches to monitoring marine ecosystem, understanding the influence of rising ocean temperature and acidity on marine food webs, sustained biological production in the ocean, and identification of disease causing marine organisms will be pursued.
Broader Impacts The proposed cyberinfrastructure enhancements will increase Rhode Island's research capacity for collaborative work in marine life sciences. The proposed broadband capacity will revitalize the Jewelry District in Providence, RI to a biotechnology based Knowledge District and promote economic growth in the state. The RI-EPSCoR Academy's workforce development and diversity initiatives will be strengthened by the improved cyber connectivity among institutions of higher education in RI. Enhanced connectivity will enable wide area video-conferencing and marine life science research related telecasts to K-12 schools. Workshops to broadly disseminate bioinformatics programs are also included.
