This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY 2006. 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 the future workforce. The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled "Describing and understanding geographic patterns of the distribution of body sizes of individuals in ecological communities." The research is quantifying the patterns of, and processes underlying, continental-scale variability in community body size patterns. It integrates data on the distribution of body sizes of individuals (or size-spectrum) from three continental scale datasets with a suite of environmental and ecological variables in order to describe and understand the form of the distribution.
The training goals include learning to develop a research program that applies quantitative methods to understand ecological systems in a manner that is both rigorous and accessible to a broad scientific audience. Specific skills to be gained include sophisticated GIS and statistical modeling, probability density estimation, and computational simulation and randomization techniques.
