The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, an institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded Associate Professor Jeffrey Chuang was awarded a three-year, $390,000 grant for “Big Genomic Data Skills Training for Professors.” The grant, which is part of the NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative, runs through June 30, 2018.
Big Genomic Data Skills Training for Professors is an educational program that will train undergraduate faculty across biology, mathematics and computer science departments to effectively teach big data skills and implement the curriculum at dominantly undergraduate institutions. Biomedical research now demands the ability to access, manipulate, integrate and analyze big data, and it is essential to train the next generation of scientists in these areas. The program will stimulate big data skills training in dozens of institutions and provides hundreds if not thousands of students with expertise for which there is increasing need.
In addition to the intensive one-week workshop for professors, the program will develop and offer an annual big data challenge. The challenges, in which undergraduates will compete across and between institutions, will demand the use of the acquired skills and provide additional research experience. In addition, the challenges will require team-driven research and data sharing and teach students the new research paradigm, which involves multi-disciplinary collaborations and the sharing of biomedical big data.