ISI will be part of a new Center for Genomic Studies on Mental
Disorders funded by a five-year $42.4 million grant from the
National Institutes of Mental Health.
The center will be headquartered at the Rutgers University
campus in New Brunswick, N.J.
The funding will support maintenance of a comprehensive
lab, clinical databases, and computational infrastructure to
fund national and international research focused on autism,
bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder,
and schizophrenia, according to Rutgers.
ISI's role will be the development of advanced
computational technologies, following up on its existing
collaboration with Rutgers on an NIH program aimed at
understanding the hereditary roots of diseases.
ISI researchers Jose-Luis Ambite and Ewa Deelman, who are
part of that effort, will also participate in the new study.
Deelman, a project leader who is adapting her group's
Pegasus Workflow Management System to guide the
NIH data acquisition system, will perform a parallel role for
the NIMH work.
Likewise, senior ISI research scientist Ambite who is already
doing data structuring and integration, will continue and
expand his efforts, building on the expertise of the ISI
Information Integration group.
ISI systems programmer Marcus Thiebaux will also be part
of the new effort, developing new ways to visualize the data
structured and integrated by his colleagues.
"This is our first foray into genomics," said Yigal Arens,
director of the ISI Intelligent Systems Division.
Washington University will also be part of the Mental Health
Genomics effort, along with the StarLIMS company, which markets an off-the-shelf
lab information management System. |
