356 CATALYZING INQUIRY
lems of how to integrate models that may have widely different physical scales, have discrete or
continuous approximations, or work at very different levels of abstraction. The driving biological prob-
lems for this center include RNA folding, myosin dynamics, neuromuscular dynamics, and cardiovas-
cular mechanics.
- The National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC) is a center based at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital in Boston that includes partners from universities and research centers around the
country. The goal of NAMIC is to develop computational tools for analysis and visualization of image
data, especially in integrating data from many different imaging technologies (e.g., magnetic resonance
imaging, electroencephalography, positron emission tomography, etc.) with genomic and clinical data.
The initial driving biological projects for NAMIC are various forms of neurological abnormality associ-
ated with schizophrenia. - The Center for Computational Biology at UCLA is also investigating questions of imaging, con-
centrating on the production of “computational atlases,” database-like structures that allow sophisti-
cated queries of large-scale data. The computational research includes mathematics of volumes and
geometry, and the driving biological projects are language development, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclero-
sis, and schizophrenia. - The Center for Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (I2B2), organized by a consor-
tium of Boston-area universities, hospitals, and medical insurance providers, seeks to develop tech-
niques to integrate and present huge sets of clinical data in ways appropriate for research into the
genetic bases of disease and, thus, helping to identify appropriate targeted therapies for individual
patients. This involves the development of statistical and algorithmic techniques for analyzing protein
structure, as well as population dynamics. The driving biological projects include airways diseases such
as asthma, hypertension, Huntington’s disease, and diabetes.
10.2.5.2.2 The National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation provides a great deal of
support for research at the BioComp interface through its programs of individual and institutional
grants. The NSF’s Directorate of Biological Sciences (BIO) formerly offered a funding program in com-
putational biology activities. The BIO directorate ended this program in 1999,^50 not because the re-
search no longer deserved funding, but because computational biology had “mainstreamed” to become
an important part of many other biological research activities, particularly environmental biology,
integrative biology, and molecular and cellular biosciences. NSF does, in its Biological Infrastructure
Division, maintain a biological databases and informatics program that funds direct research into the
creation of tools and datasets.
In its 2003 report Science and Engineering Infrastructure for the 21st Century: The Role of the National
Science Foundation, NSF concludes that its support for science and engineering infrastructure
(cyberinfrastructure), in which it includes next-generation computational tools and data analysis and
interpretation toolkits (along with a great deal of other infrastructure elements), should increase from 22
percent of its total budget to 27 percent; it also recommends strengthening its support for cross-disci-
plinary fields of research. Both of these recommendations are likely to improve the funding climate for
computational biology and bioinformatics, although of course they will still be competing with a num-
ber of other important infrastructure programs.
Many existing NSF funding programs emphasize interdisciplinary research and thus are effective
vehicles for supporting BioComp research, although not exclusively. For example, the Integrative Gradu-
ate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program offers 5-year, $3 million grants to universities
to support interdisciplinary graduate student training.^51 Many of the existing programs funded by
IGERT work at the BioComp interface, such as bioinformatics, computational neuroscience, computa-
(^50) See http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1999/nsf99162/nsf99162.htm.
(^51) See http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2005/nsf05517/nsf05517.htm.