Finally NSF let the cat out of the bag. A press release today officially announced the creation of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, or NIMBioS. The center is funded by a $16 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is located at the University of Tennessee (UT) Knoxville. According to the press release:
Biologists and mathematicians from around the world will take part in a new institute dedicated to bringing top researchers together to find creative solutions to pressing problems in both scientific fields.
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Mathematical biology is a growing field that applies the power of mathematics and modeling to the questions at multiple scales of space and time faced by biologists.
The High Performance Computer infrastructure available to the center will not be shabby either:
This grant follows on the heels of the NSF creation of the National Institute for Computational Sciences at UT Knoxville, a $65 million award to build and operate a supercomputer to assist scientists nationwide.
UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory experts in high-performance computing will work with NIMBioS scientists to apply the power of supercomputing to the difficult questions NIMBioS will answer.
According to NSF they are expecting more than 600 researchers to visit the center each year and participate in working groups and conferences.
BTW, the press release is illustrated with very cool figures from Sergey Gavrilets lab of simulation models of adaptive radiation and sympatric speciation.
And here is the press release from UT.
This is from the “Mario’s Entangled Bank” blog ( http://pineda-krch.com ) of Mario Pineda-Krch, a theoretical biologist at the University of California, Davis.
