NIGMS and NSF Grants Join Math and Biology

By Alisa Zapp Machalek (301) 496-7301
August 22, 2002

To encourage the use of mathematical tools and approaches to study biology, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences recently joined with the National Science Foundation to award 20 grants in mathematical biology.

The agencies are awarding close to $6 million for the first year of these awards. They anticipate spending more than $24 million on the projects over five years.

The partnership between NIGMS and NSF takes advantage of the strengths of each agency. NIGMS supports research and training in the basic biomedical sciences. NSF funds mathematical and other quantitative sciences such as physics, computer science and engineering.

"Advances in biomedical research in the 21st century will be critically dependent on collaboration between biologists and scientists in other disciplines, such as mathematics. The NIGMS-NSF partnership exemplifies the type of interdisciplinary cooperation that the new awards promote," said Dr. Judith H. Greenberg, acting director of NIGMS.

Other initiatives in which NIGMS spurs mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and engineers to apply their quantitative expertise to biology are described at http://www.nigms.nih.gov/funding/complex_systems.html. NIGMS also recently established a Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology to be the focal point for such interdisciplinary research and training. (See: http://www.nigms.nih.gov/news/releases/cbcb.html.)

The new awards are listed below, alphabetically by principal investigator.

• Dynamics and Evolution of Emerging Diseases with Applications to Amphibians (Linda J.S. Allen, Texas Tech University)
   
• Modeling, Estimation and Control in HIV Dynamics (Thomas H. Banks, North Carolina State University) 
   
• Cell-to-Cell Signaling in Bacterial Biofilms (David L. Chopp, Northwestern University) 
   
• Modeling the Acute Inflammatory Response (Carson C. Chow, University of Pittsburgh) 
   
• Tangle Analysis of DNA Recombinases and Related Proteins (Isabel K. Darcy, University of Texas at Dallas) 
   
• Statistical Tools for RNA Folding Prediction and Antisense and Ribozyme Design for High-Throughput Functional Genomics (Ye Ding, New York State Department of Health) 
   
• Probability and Statistics Problems Concerning DNA Sequence and Genome Evolution (Richard T. Durrett, Cornell University) 
   
• Mathematics of Ions in Protein Channels (Robert S. Eisenberg, Rush Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center) 
   
• Integrative Models of Microorganism Motility (Lisa J. Fauci, Tulane University) 
   
• Exploring Massive Gene Expression Data With a Novel Statistical Notion-Liquid Association (Ker-Chau Li, University of California, Los Angeles) 
   
• Biological Fluid Dynamics in Morphogenesis (Sharon R. Lubkin, North Carolina State University) 
   
• Modeling Evolution of Quantitative Traits with Finite Locus Effects in Structured Populations (Judith R. Miller, Georgetown University) 
   
• Transport and Heterogeneity in Surface Volume Reactions (Chris S. Raymond, University of Wisconsin) 
   
• Toward RNA Genomics: A Pilot Study in the Analysis, Design, and Prediction of RNA Structures (Tamar Schlick, New York University) 
   
• Protein Interactions Underlying Actin-Based Motility (David S. Sept, Washington University in St. Louis) 
   
• Antibiotic Susceptibility of Bacteria in Biofilms (Philip S. Stewart, Montana State University) 
   
• Computational Methods for Functional Genomics (Simon Tavare, University of Southern California) 
   
• New Algorithms for Modeling Flexibility in Proteins (Michael F. Thorpe, Michigan State University) 
   
• Morphogen Systems: A Joint Math and Experimental Investigation (Frederic Y. Wan, University of California, Irvine) 
   
• Computational and Experimental Studies of Mouse Embryonic Stem Cell Differentiation (Wing H. Wong, Harvard College)

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For information about these new awards, contact Alisa Machalek in the NIGMS Office of Communications and Public Liaison at (301) 496-7301 or Amber Jones in the NSF Office of Legislative and Public Affairs at (703) 292-8070.