Contact: Maridith Geuder
Mississippi State is among seven institutions receiving funding under a new National Institutes of Health initiative to expand the use of computers in improving human health.
Giles Distinguished Professors Janice E. Chambers and Joe F. Thompson recently were awarded a three-year, $1.1 million grant to lay the groundwork for a biomedical computing research center at MSU. At the end of a two-year planning and organizational period, they will seek additional funding to have the center designated an NIH Program of Excellence in Biomedical Computing.
Columbia, Rutgers, Stanford, and Yale universities, University of Utah and the Seattle, Wash.-based Institute for Systems Biology are receiving similar planning grants.
"The NIH initiative is a response to recommendations by the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee," said Thompson, who, like Chambers, is an MSU graduate.
An aerospace engineer and a founding member of the university's Engineering Research Center, Thompson is among 24 members of the presidential advisory committee. Last year, committee members issued a report outlining a national agenda for expanding information technology research in health-care applications.
"Computational simulation long has been used in the physical sciences to assist in uncovering fundamental scientific principles," said Robert A. Altenkirch, MSU vice president for research. "With our rich history in this area and the recent movement of the biological sciences toward computational simulation, the university is well positioned to be a leader in this emerging field."
Thompson, a Grenada native, said the university's planning effort will incorporate a cross-disciplinary faculty model the ERC has successfully applied in physical sciences such as engineering, physics and mathematics.
"In this new effort, we will draw together faculty members to build on the university's established computational and biomedical research strengths," Thompson said.
Chambers, an environmental toxicologist who is founder and head of the university's Center for Environmental Health Sciences, said the grants come from a variety of NIH centers and institutes representing specific research areas. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is providing MSU's initial funding.
"In collaboration with other research programs at Mississippi State, we will be focusing on computational simulation of biological processes as they relate to environmental health of humans," she explained.
Chambers said new technologies that incorporate detailed modeling of the many human variables should significantly impact future environmental health research. As an example, she cited possibilities for expanding an earlier study of pesticide effects on children that she and others at the environmental health sciences center had completed.
"Our ultimate goal is to better protect human health by predicting the effect of chemicals both alone and in combination on a variety of human populations," she said. "With the application of computational technologies, the horizons for this and other scientific studies would seem limitless."