Brown receives $11.5M grant to launch Center for Biomedical Research Excellence

BROWN UNIVERSITY SAID the Center for Computational Molecular Biology has helped lay the groundwork for the newly awarded Center for Biomedical Research Excellence. / COURTESY BROWN UNIVERSITY
BROWN UNIVERSITY SAID the Center for Computational Molecular Biology has helped lay the groundwork for the newly awarded Center for Biomedical Research Excellence. / COURTESY BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE – A five-year, $11.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will allow Brown University to launch a new Center for Biomedical Research Excellence to study cancer, preeclampsia and severe lung infections.
The university announced the grant award and plans for the center Wednesday in a press release.
The funding will support five early-career faculty members, the release said.

“Turning data into information you can use for something is what computational biology is all about,” David Rand, director of the new center and chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, said in a statement.
David Savitz, Brown’s vice president for research, said the new center will bring together researchers to generate new insights to advance medicine and health.
“Brown scientists and students from a number of departments around the university — from computer science and applied mathematics to biology, medicine and public health — have been working collaboratively to understand and realize the benefits of advanced genomics,” said Savitz, also a professor in the School of Public Health. “This new COBRE will expand those programs to help move Brown to the forefront of this exciting, promising field of research.”
To date, computational biology researchers have had to develop their own in-house technical capabilities, but the COBRE will build a research core through which staff will be able to develop and code technical implementations for the center’s researchers, freeing valuable time and resources in their own labs.
The center will fund research of five teams of scientists in which younger faculty members will pursue studies related to human disease under the mentorship of two more senior professors: one with expertise in computing and mathematics and another with expertise in biology and medicine. In addition, the COBRE will support researchers with an administrative core to support new seed projects. Besides staffing in individual labs, the grant will allow the university to hire four new technical staff members to expand the COBRE computational core.
These resources will contribute to the integration of related programs across the university including the Data Science Initiative, the Data Science Practice group and the Brown Center for Biomedical Informatics, the release said.
Projects that will begin June 1 include bioinformatics screening of a fruit fly model to identify new drug targets for extending a healthy lifespan, and developing new computational and analytical methodologies to identify risk genes for leukemia that differ in incidence across ethnic groups and genders.
The news release said that the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, which originated in the early 2000s from the computational biology program created a decade earlier, helped lay the groundwork for the newly awarded Center for Biomedical Research Excellence.

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