REU Site: Educating for the grand challenges at the intersection of biocomplexity and high-performance computing

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This REU Site award to the University of Missouri (MU), located in Columbia, MO, will support the training of 12 students for 9 weeks during the summers of 2014-2016. This award is supported by both the Directorates for Biological Sciences (Division of Biological Infrastructure) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (Division of Mathematical Sciences). Pairs of student researchers, one from the computational sciences and the other from the life sciences, will work collaboratively at the interface of high performance computing and big data biology. Students will select from a diverse group of research projects, with a choice of mentors from five departments in the computational and life sciences. Example projects include developing parallel computing approaches to allow the identification of gene duplications that occurred with important evolutionary transitions such as the origins of mammalian placentation and using parallel computers and GPUs to infer the plant tree of life with data from high-throughput sequencing. In addition, participants will join other campus summer research programs -- attending professional development sessions, training in the responsible conduct of research, and participating in weekly sessions on parallel computing and biology. Participants will be recruited from a variety of institutions, with preference given to students from minority-serving institutions and undergraduate-only colleges. The PIs and research mentors will select the participants (half from the computational and half from the life sciences) and help them choose a computational or biological partner. Participants' progress will be assessed with pre- and post-tests covering the program's technical material. The program will be evaluated using NSF's common assessment tool.Computation, and especially parallel computation, will be vital to science and engineering in the future, as increasing data volumes from instruments such as next-generation DNA sequencers generate enormous amount of data. The training and research experience offered at this REU site will give the participants unique opportunities to be trained in this important area.Students are required to be tracked after the program and must respond to an automatic email sent via the NSF reporting system. More information is available by visiting http://muii.missouri.edu/reu_bigdata, or by contacting the PI (Dr. Gavin Conant; conantg@missouri.edu) or the co-PI (Dr. Chi-Ren Shyu; shyuc@missouri.edu).