NSF $1.5 Million Grant Funds New Scientific Field

Contact: Marc Archambault
Phone: (713) 527-4752

NSF $1.5 Million Grant Funds New Scientific Field
Innovative training may change the face of science, medicine &
health care

Houston’s scientific community and
three of its key institutions of higher learning received a
tremendous boost from the federal government this week.

The W. M. Keck Center for Computational Biology, a joint effort
of Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine, and the University
of Houston, was awarded a grant of approximately $1.5 million over
five years by the National Science Foundation to continue the
center’s groundbreaking program of cross-training students of all
levels in both biology and cutting-edge computer science. The
Center was founded in 1990, with the support of the W. M. Keck
Foundation.

The grant funds a proposal headed by George N. Phillips, Jr.,
professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice University and
scientific and training director of the Keck Center at Rice.

"This award is the result of a unique collaboration between
faculty and students in different disciplines and at different
institutions working together as a community of scientists," said
Phillips. "We share a common vision of the exciting new
possibilities that modern computing technologies can bring to
biology."

The Keck Center’s scientific and training directors at Baylor
and University of Houston each stressed the award’s importance.

"The Center is ushering in an entirely new branch of science,
whose practitioners take full advantage of the recent breakthroughs
in computational science in their pursuit of important biological
questions," said Monte Pettitt, Cullen Professor of Chemistry at the
University of Houston.

Drawing on their interdisciplinary training, Keck Center
faculty and trainees find that analyses that only recently required
painstaking weeks are now performed in seconds; crucial data once
buried in overburdened databases are now at their fingertips; and
previously mysterious molecular interactions are now revealed in
breathtaking detail.

Emphasizing the potential contributions of this new field, Wah
Chiu, director and professor of Baylor’s Program in Structural and
Computational Biology, said "Computational biology can be used to
design anti-viral drugs, analyze normal and diseased human genes and
engineer proteins for industrial use. These tools will carry
medicine, industry, agriculture, and forensics into the twenty-first
century. And they hold vast potential for revolutionizing American
health care while holding down costs."

The NSF award fuels the Keck Center’s successful graduate study
program and expands its current training efforts with undergraduate
and postdoctoral trainees by paying for tuition, living stipends,
and some research expenses. The grant will also fund the development
of innovative new curricula for students and help disseminate the
center’s research through seminars, symposia, and workshops.

Interview opportunity: If you would like to schedule an
interview with Scientific Directors Chiu, Pettitt or Phillips or
other representatives of the Keck Center, or would like more
information, contact Marc Archambault, executive director of the
W.M. Keck Center for Computational Biology at (713) 527-4752.

###