: Funding is sought for a five year transitional training period for Dr. S. Manduchi to complete the move from Mathematics to Computational Biology/Bioinformatics. Dr. Manduchi has a strong training in Mathematics at the research level, a solid knowledge of Statistics, and an intermediate training in Computer Science. She has begun the transition into Computational Biology/Bioinformatics with a two year postdoc in the Biology Department at the University of Pennsylvania (Upenn), under professor Warren Ewens (funded by the National Science Foundation). During this postdoc she has split her time between the Computational Biology and Informatics Laboratory (CBIL) and working with Professor Ewens and others on several research projects. This resulted in two papers; one published, one accepted for publication. She has established several productive collaborations on various projects with members of PCBI (the Penn Center for Bioinformatics, of which CBIL is part) and its collaborators. Therefore it is desired to get funding to extend the stay for five years. The work plan for the five years is: 1) To continue working on the ongoing research projects on gene expression analysis, disease gene locating, developing genomics resources (databases and tools), and tissue-specific regulation. There will of course be many other unforseen research projects over the period. Computer, mathematical and statistical methods are becoming ubiquitous in all aspects of the health sciences and there will continue to be a great need for collaboration between researchers from different backgrounds in the Upenn's large biomedical complex. At least 60% working effort will be given to basic research of this type. 2) To attend courses in Biochemistry and Biology, as well as specific courses in Computer Science and Statistics that are relevant to Bioinformatics; roughly one course per semester. 3) To attend an average of one mini-course or workshop and two conferences per year in the held of Computational Biology/Bioinformatics. 4) To conduct a six month lab rotation in the laboratory of Dr. Klaus Kaestner (Dept. of Genetics, Upenn). 5) To continue participation in the PCBI reading group, in the organization of the two-semester Computational Biology course, and in the coordination of the Computational Biology/Bioinformatics Seminar series at Upenn.
