This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY2001. 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 of the future workforce.
The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled "Inferring the nature of quantitative genetic variation: methods for integrating single and multi-locus analyses." The goal of this project is to extend quantitative genetic theory to the study of individual genes, and then to use that theory to develop methods for analyzing sequence polymorphism data from quantitative trait loci (QTL). This theoretical framework allows the testing of hypotheses about the nature of genetic variation.