News

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the CompGen initiative are sponsoring two Spring 2015 fellowships for graduate students working in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, or biologically relevant computational science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (more…)

By Claudia Lutz, IGB

Today’s researchers, working with the advantages of new, sophisticated laboratory technology, have unleashed a river of valuable biomedical data—much more, in fact, than many of them have the tools to properly analyze, or the capacity to store. In 2012, the National Institutes of Health created the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative to enable efforts to harness the potential of this flood of information. As part of the first wave of BD2K funding, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Mayo Clinic have now received a $9.34M, 4-year award to create one of several new Centers of Excellence for Big Data Computing. (more…)

By Diana Yates, Life Sciences Editor, News Bureau

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Many beekeepers feed their honey bees sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup when times are lean inside the hive. This practice has come under scrutiny, however, in response to colony collapse disorder, the massive — and as yet not fully explained — annual die-off of honey bees in the U.S. and Europe. Some suspect that inadequate nutrition plays a role in honey bee declines. (more…)

CompGen Fellowship Program

The CompGen Fellowship program awards predoctoral fellowships, funded by the NSF and the University of Illinois, to promote interdisciplinary research in computational genomics. Fellows can be either computationally focused doctoral students with a biology co-advisor, or biologically focused doctoral students with a computational co-advisor. The fellowships were initially founded to support research directly relevant to the NSF-funded CompGen instrument, a supercomputer designed exclusively for genomic biology. The fellowship program now also supports fellows in any branch of interdisciplinary computational genomics. (more…)

High-tech thinking is ingrained in every inch of the new Electrical and Computer Engineering Building, but it’s the cavernous spaces that catch the untrained eye.

And those, as it turns out, are a part of the plan, too. (more…)

The first CompGen Consortium Meeting was held April 3–4, 2014, at the Coordinated Science Lab and the Institute of Genomic Biology on the UIUC campus. (more…)

Through the CompGen initiative, the University’s Institute for Genomic Biology and the Coordinated Science Laboratory in the College of Engineering are bringing together top faculty in genomic and computational sciences to create a dynamic team that will develop new technology for genomic breakthroughs. (more…)

After 25 years of breakthroughs and $14-billion in federal support, the revolution in genomics—and all its promises of miracle cures—is now firmly in the hands of the computer geeks. (more…)

When scientists first mapped the human genome in 2000, the promise of personalized medicine went from a remote dream to a breakthrough within grasp. Thirteen years later, however, momentum has slowed because the ability to sequence DNA has begun to outpace computing—in particular, the capability of storing, transmitting and, most critically, analyzing the data.

(more…)