Abstract

Biology is in the midst of a revolution. An era dominated by the identification and characterization of parts- genes, proteins, organelles, cells-is giving way to one focused on complex interaction networks, principles of design, and the role of network function in the context of the entire organism. The immediate product of this revolution is an emerging field, Systems Biology, that breaks with the past not only in the types of questions it asks, but also in the diverse disciplines it draws heavily upon, including mathematics, computer science, engineering, and physics. This application requests renewal of a pre-doctoral training program designed to produce Ph.D.s prepared for careers in Systems Biology. The program was initially developed as part of a collaboration between the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the NIH (NIBIB) to develop new, interdisciplinary Ph.D. training programs at the interface between the biological sciences and other disciplines. Eight predoctoral trainee slots are requested, for appointments intended to last two years each. Highlights of the program include an extensive didactic curriculum; a focus on critical thinking skills; an emphasis on collaboration and collaborative learning; close mentoring, opportunities to develop career skills; and active student involvement. The 43 program faculty members come from twelve different departments in five schools at the University of California, Irvine, and conduct research on diverse topics within Systems Biology. The program enjoys strong campus support, and an administrative and intellectual home within the UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems, an NIH-supported National Center for Systems Biology.

Public Health Relevance

Biological and biomedical research are increasingly focused on complex systems. By training the next generation of researchers in an interdisciplinary mode-blending biology with mathematics, computer science, engineering and physics-the proposed program will help future scientists and educators function effectively in this new research environment.

  Funding Agency

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
Type
Institutional National Research Service Award (T32)
Project #
2T32EB009418-06A1
Application #
8855296
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZEB1-OSR-D (J1))
Program Officer
Baird, Richard A
Project Start
2009-04-01
Project End
2020-03-31
Budget Start
2015-04-01
Budget End
2016-03-31
Support Year
6
Fiscal Year
2015
Total Cost
$243,707
Indirect Cost
$13,378

  Institution

Name
University of California Irvine
Department
Miscellaneous
Type
Organized Research Units
DUNS #
046705849
City
Irvine
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92697

  Publications

Yan, Huaming; Konstorum, Anna; Lowengrub, John S (2018) Three-Dimensional Spatiotemporal Modeling of Colon Cancer Organoids Reveals that Multimodal Control of Stem Cell Self-Renewal is a Critical Determinant of Size and Shape in Early Stages of Tumor Growth. Bull Math Biol 80:1404-1433
Lawson, Devon A; Kessenbrock, Kai; Davis, Ryan T et al. (2018) Tumour heterogeneity and metastasis at single-cell resolution. Nat Cell Biol 20:1349-1360
Wyman, Dana; Mortazavi, Ali (2018) TranscriptClean: Variant-aware correction of indels, mismatches, and splice junctions in long-read transcripts. Bioinformatics :
Duong, Vy T; Chen, Zihao; Thapa, Mahendra T et al. (2018) Computational Studies of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins. J Phys Chem B 122:10455-10469
Nguyen, Quy H; Pervolarakis, Nicholas; Blake, Kerrigan et al. (2018) Profiling human breast epithelial cells using single cell RNA sequencing identifies cell diversity. Nat Commun 9:2028
Nguyen, Quy H; Pervolarakis, Nicholas; Nee, Kevin et al. (2018) Experimental Considerations for Single-Cell RNA Sequencing Approaches. Front Cell Dev Biol 6:108
Rackauckas, Christopher; Schilling, Thomas; Nie, Qing (2018) Interdisciplinary Case Study: How Mathematicians and Biologists Found Order in Cellular Noise. iScience 8:267-270
Kent, Alyssa G; Garcia, Catherine A; Martiny, Adam C (2018) Increased biofilm formation due to high-temperature adaptation in marine Roseobacter. Nat Microbiol 3:989-995
Duong, Vy T; Unhelkar, Megha H; Kelly, John E et al. (2018) Protein structure networks provide insight into active site flexibility in esterase/lipases from the carnivorous plant Drosera capensis. Integr Biol (Camb) 10:768-779
Horan, Sean T; Gardner, Adam R; Saager, Rolf et al. (2018) Recovery of layered tissue optical properties from spatial frequency-domain spectroscopy and a deterministic radiative transport solver. J Biomed Opt 24:1-11

Showing the most recent 10 out of 62 publications