Wyoming EPSCoR's, Alex Buerkle, has been awarded a 4-year, $6 million NSF EPSCoR RII Track-2 grant.  The award comes in support of a proposal entitled Creating Explanatory, Process-Based Models to Harness the Data Revolution in the Life Sciences.  

The volume and availability of data have increased enormously over the last decade in life sciences.  Such expansion is occurring rapidly, changing the standard scale of analyses and is leveling and extending access to a broader population of both scientists and general audiences via open-access data.

With such rapid expansion in mind, this project aims to "establish a consortium that will fundamentally advance our capacity to analyze challenging, highly dimensional data in the life sciences".  Their plan to reach this goal falls within 3 primary objectives.  Each objective has been reviewed to ensure they are complementary to each other while remaining integrated into the specificity of the project.  Those objectives include:

1. Assessing, developing, and disseminating innovative and computational methods for predictive and explanatory models of high dimensional data.

2. Formalizing life science knowledge in models for three cross-scale domains.

3. Training and fostering the development of scientists for the workforce, through education and inclusion in data science.

To aid in completing these carefully established goals, the interdisciplinary data science team is looking to hire 12 postdoctoral researchers.  Incoming researchers will, ideally, span multiple research areas in ecology and evolutionary biology.  They will also span three universities, uniting the University of Wyoming, University of Nevada-Reno, and the University of Montana, Flathead Lake Bio Station.  

In the words of the interdisciplinary data science team,

"We initiated this consortium to address cross-cutting challenges in the analysis and representation of knowledge in the life sciences."

We look forward to providing updates on the project as research begins to unfold.  But, for now, we would like to congratulate Alex Buerkle, once again, on his 4-year, $6 million NSF EPSCoR RII Track-2 grant!