Bioinformatics Programs at Minority Institutions

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to increase minority participation in biomedical research through an educational and research program that is formulated to assist minority serving institutions establishing bioinformatics programs ranging in size from a single course to a degree program. We will assist five primary partners that have established a sequence based bioinformatics course in developing a more extensive bioinformatics program consisting of multiple courses, degrees/certificates, publications and grant support. In addition, we will continue to assist in establishing initial courses with a rotating series of informal partners. We will also enhance our support with an online, educational computational center and learning environment. This center will facilitate educational initiatives with a stand-alone streaming set of multimedia modules covering critical bioinformatics concepts ranging from basic biology to advanced bioinformatics topics to applying bioinformatics software in optimal ways. In addition, the center will serve as a self paced interdisciplinary bioinformatics resource for students and faculty at minority serving institutions enabling bioinformatics resources to be accessed through an environment that provides educational support. Specifically we will achieve this goal through a four component program that includes: 1) Improving the curriculum at minority serving institutions by adding bioinformatics components into multiple courses and in multiple departments, and integrating bioinformatics into research projects. 2) A summer institute which trains faculty from minority serving institutions in bioinformatics teaching and research techniques. 3) An Online Educational Center and learning environment featuring online interdisciplinary teaching resources supplemented with multimedia modules, bioinformatics software and problem sets. 4) An eight week research internship focused on publishable research results. This four component program assists minority serving institutions by embedding aspects of bioinformatics into a broad swath of scientific disciplines in both coursework and research activities. RELEVANCE: This project assists minority scientists in making their research more effective and efficient by training them to make use of modern bioinformatics techniques to exploit the large amount of sequence, genomics, and protein structural data being generated in biomedical research.