Washington, DC
January 30, 2008
The National Science
Foundation (NSF) today announced a $50 million award to a
University of Arizona-led team to create the first national
cyberinfrastructure center to tackle global "grand challenge"
plant biology questions that have great implications on larger
questions regarding the environment, agriculture, energy and the
very organisms that sustain our existance on earth.
Like no other single research entity, the iPlant Collaborative
will provide the capacity to draw upon resources and talent in
remote locations and enable plant scientists, computer
scientists and information scientists from around the world for
the first time ever to collaboratively address questions of
global importance and advance all of these fields. It will bring
together and leverage the resources and information generated
through the National Plant Genome Initiative, enabling more
breadth and depth of research in every aspect of plant science.
"We are confident in the positive returns of this substantive
investment in basic research," said NSF Director Arden L.
Bement. "The iPlant Collaborative will harness the best and the
brightest scholars and research in plant biology in order to
tackle some of the profound issues of our day and for our
future. Challenges that may need plants for solutions include
addressing the impacts of climate change, dwindling oil supply,
decreasing agricultural land area, increasing population and
environmental degradation."
The iPlant center will be located in and administered by the
University of Arizona's BIO5 Institute. BIO5 was founded to
encourage collaboration across scientific disciplines,
accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and develop
innovative solutions to society's most complex biological
challenges.
"This global center is going to change the way we do science,"
says UA plant sciences professor and BIO5 member Richard
Jorgensen, who is the lead investigator and director of the
iPlant Collaborative.
"The iPlant team has a compelling vision for an organization by,
for and of the community, that will bring to bear the power of
cyberinfrastructure to enable scientists everywhere to take on
some of the most important questions in plant science," said
Joann Roskoski, executive officer of the NSF Directorate for
Biological Sciences.
The cyberinfrastructure and the researchers will rely heavily on
computational thinking, a form of problem-solving that assigns
computers the jobs they're most efficient at, and in doing so
frees up humans to spend more time on the creative tasks that
humans do best. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure will serve as a
model for solving problems in fields outside of plant biology
too.
One feature of iPlant that will be developed is the ability to
map the full expanse of plant biology research in much the way
Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth or Mapquest utilizes
mapping technology. Like users of these applications, users of
iPlant may one day be able to "zoom" in and out among various
levels of plant biology, from the molecular to the organismic to
the ecosystem level. For example, a researcher might "zoom in"
to analyze the carbon fixed, oxygen produced, and water utilized
by individual leaves, then "zoom out" to analyze how all of
these might effect large-scale changes in ecosystems and how
that could in turn affect air quality and climate.
Because collaboration among disciplines is central to iPlant's
mission, the cyberinfrastructure also will have a strong
networking component to facilitate communication among
researchers from different fields. It will also conduct research
on the effectiveness of social networking in iPlant and in the
plant and computer and information sciences generally.
All iPlant projects will have K-12, undergraduate and graduate
education components as well, which is co-funded by NSF, BIO5
and Science Foundation Arizona. Students, teachers, and
interested laypeople will all have access to iPlant's resources
and data, as well as to educational tools designed to help them
understand that data and develop inquiry-based learning modules
for K through 12, undergraduate, and graduate science education.
The iPlant Collaborative is a five-year project that is
potentially renewable for a second five years and a total of
$100 million. This award is greater than three times the size of
any other NSF award received in Arizona to date.
Other institutions working with The University of Arizona (UA)
include Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Arizona State University,
the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Purdue
University. UA participants in the iPlant Collaborative include
the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Department of
Plant Sciences, the College of Science's Departments of Computer
Science, Mathematics and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the
Eller College of Management's Department of Management
Information Systems, the College of Engineering's Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Arizona Research
Lab's Biocomputing Facility. The project' board of directors
will be chaired by Robert Last, PhD, a Michigan State University
professor.
RELATED RELEASE
University of Arizona led research team awarded $50 million to
solve plant biology's grand challenges
The National Science Foundation has awarded a
University of Arizona–led
team $50 million dollars to create a global center and computer
cyberinfrastructure within which to answer plant biology's grand
challenge questions, which no single research entity in the
world currently has the capacity to address. The project will
unite plant scientists, computer scientists and information
scientists from around the world for the first time ever to
provide answers to questions of global importance and advance
all of these fields.
The five-year project, dubbed the iPlant Collaborative,
potentially is renewable for a second five years for a total of
$100 million.
“This global center is going to change the way we do science,”
says UA plant sciences professor and BIO5 member Richard
Jorgensen, who is the lead investigator and director of the
iPlant Collaborative. “We’re bringing many different types of
scientists together who rarely had opportunities to talk to one
another before. In so doing, we’ll create the kind of
multidisciplinary environment that is necessary to crack the
toughest problems in modern biology.”
Other institutions working with the UA include Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory in New York, Arizona State University, the
University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Purdue
University. The project’s board of directors will be chaired by
Robert Last, from Michigan State University.
About 79 percent of the grant will stay at the UA, with CSHL
receiving approximately 16 percent, ASU four percent, and UNCW
and Purdue a combined one percent.
UA participants in the iPlant Collaborative include BIO5, the
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ Department of Plant
Sciences; the College of Science’s Departments of Computer
Science, Mathematics, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; the
Eller College of Management’s Department of Management
Information Systems; the College of Engineering’s Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering; the Arizona Research Lab’s
Biotechnology Computing Facility; and University Information
Technology Services.
The iPlant center will be located in the UA’s BIO5 Institute in
Tucson and will be administered by BIO5, the UA’s premier
biotechnology center. BIO5 was founded to encourage
collaboration across scientific disciplines, accelerate the pace
of scientific discovery and develop innovative solutions to
society’s most complex biological challenges.
“The iPlant team,” said Joann Roskoski, executive officer of the
NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences, “has a compelling
vision for an organization by, for and of the community, that
will bring to bear the power of cyberinfrastructure to enable
scientists everywhere to take on some of the most important
questions in plant science.”
The iPlant Collaborative will create both a physical center and
a virtual computing space where researchers can communicate and
work together as they share, analyze and manipulate data, all
while seeking answers to plant biology’s greatest unsolved
mysteries – its grand-challenge questions.
Solving grand challenges is crucial, Jorgensen says, because
plants affect every aspect of our lives. “Everything’s
connected,” he explains. “As our climate changes and our
environment changes we need to have a deep understanding of the
biology of plants from the molecular to the ecosystem level in
order to understand and mitigate the problems that will arise –
to adapt as best we can and to focus our efforts on saving the
organisms and ecosystems that are most important to save.”
The collaborative is designed so that any research team from any
consortium of institutions or disciplines can propose a
grand-challenge question. iPlant will facilitate the
identification of such questions by the plant biology community
(two to four the first year) and develop the iPlant
cyberinfrastructure to help scientists answer those questions.
The cyberinfrastructure and the researchers will rely heavily on
computational thinking, a form of problem-solving that assigns
computers the jobs they’re most efficient at, and in doing so
frees up humans to spend more time on the creative tasks that
humans do best. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure will serve as a
model for solving problems in fields outside of plant biology,
too.
One feature of iPlant that will be developed is the ability to
map the full expanse of plant biology research in much the way
that Google Earth physically maps our planet. Like users of
Google Earth, users of iPlant may one day be able to “zoom” in
and out among various levels of plant biology, from the
molecular to the organismic to the ecosystem level. For example,
a researcher might “zoom in” to analyze the carbon fixed, oxygen
produced and water utilized by individual leaves, then “zoom
out” to analyze how all of these might affect large-scale
changes in ecosystems and how that could in turn affect air
quality and climate.
Because collaboration among disciplines is central to iPlant’s
mission, the cyberinfrastructure also will have a strong social
networking component for both facilitating communication among
researchers from different fields as they work and for
researching the effectiveness of social networking in iPlant and
in the plant and computer and information sciences generally.
All iPlant projects will have K–12, undergraduate and graduate
education components as well, which are co-funded by NSF, BIO5
and Science Foundation Arizona. Students, teachers and the
public will all have access to iPlant’s resources and data, as
well as to educational tools designed to help them understand
that data and develop inquiry-based learning modules for K–12,
undergraduate and graduate science education.
“The learning activities that will evolve from the iPlant
collaborative will bring the challenges of real-world
problem-solving and discovery to the classroom for both students
and teachers. Science Foundation Arizona’s investment will
ensure that Arizona students are engaged from day one,” says
William C. Harris, president and CEO of Science Foundation
Arizona.
BIO5 Director Vicki Chandler, also a principal investigator,
explains, “Because of the Internet and cyberinfrastructure, this
is the first time in the history of science that everyone can
access the same data at the same time using the same tools as
the researchers generating that data. The exciting challenge is
to produce tools that students and teachers can readily access.”
Each proposed grand-challenge question will have practical
applications and societal implications. For a field like plant
biology, those implications are many and far-reaching. “Human
existence on this planet is absolutely dependent on plants,”
Chandler says. “Our houses, our food, our atmosphere –
everything about the quality of human life depends on plants.”
Welcome News to Arizona Leaders
The award – one of the largest NSF grants ever to an Arizona
entity – came as welcome news to Arizona’s leaders, who have
been working to build the state’s bioscience capacities in
research and economic development.
“Today’s announcement is proof that our investment in higher
education is paying off,” Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said at
an Arizona state capitol news conference. “Arizona’s future lies
in innovation in areas like the biosciences, and we are
tremendously proud that the National Science Foundation has
chosen Arizona to chart a new course in plant science research.”
“This is the sort of big return on investment that the UA has
promised the State of Arizona since the BIO5 Institute was
opened and housed with critical state investments,” said UA
President Robert N. Shelton. “BIO5 is ideally suited to house
the iPlant Collaborative. Its work will span scientific
disciplines and bring together plant biologists of all kinds to
examine plant life across its entire continuum, from individual
plant cells to entire ecosystems.”
“This remarkable grant recognizes the great work being done
every day by the researchers and students of The University of
Arizona, particularly in the field of bioscience research. The
UA has emerged as a leader in bioscience research and education,
and I appreciate the National Science Foundation for recognizing
their capabilities. Their achievement under this grant will
benefit the people of Southern Arizona as well as all
Americans,” says Congressman Raul Grijalva.
“As a Member of the US House Science and Technology Committee, I
recognize the importance of bioscience research in Arizona and I
congratulate the University of Arizona for this outstanding
grant award from the National Science Foundation. The successes
of this iPlant Collaborative, lead by the UA, will pay dividends
to the scientific community for years to come, and will be the
basis for more such awards in the future,” Congresswoman
Gabrielle Giffords said. |
|
