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| About the MidSouth Bioinformatics Center (MBC) |
| History and accomplishments |
The MidSouth Bioinformatics Center at UALR (MBC) is a regional bioinformatics center serving a surrounding seven-state area. Formed in 2002 by Dr. Steve Jennings with start-up funding provided by the National Institutes of Health’s Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network grant to Arkansas and by the Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering within the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), the MBC currently employs 2½ staff and nine graduate assistants. The MBC is the first bioinformatics center within the region primarily charted to support bioinformatics educational efforts.
By providing direct support to the seventeen graduate students and over sixty faculty participating in the joint UALR/University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences bioinformatics graduate program; the undergraduate students in the UALR bioinformatics minor; and educators, students and researchers at seven Arkansas undergraduate institutions participating in the National Institutes of Health’s program, the MBC helps train future generations of researchers and support personnel in the medical, health and life sciences. Through outreach activities with Little Rock secondary schools, professional development workshops for researchers, and career advancement opportunities for working professionals, the MBC also helps advance technical and scientific education within the region.
In 2002, the MBC sponsored the formation of the MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society, a seven-state regional affiliate of the International Society for Computational Biology, and hosted MCBIOS’ first two annual conferences; the fourth annual conference will be held in New Orleans in February 2007 with about 150 participants and proceedings published in BMC Bioinformatics, the bioinformatics journal with the second-highest impact rating. Additionally, it has sponsored a number of statewide and regional events including a symposium on “nanotoxicity and bioinformatics” and a budding effort to establish a regional biosciences computing grid. The MBC has active collaborations with other regional groups including the Great Plains Network Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Group and the University of Oklahoma’s Supercomputing Center for Education and Research.
By providing hardware platforms; commercial, open-source, and in-house software and webservices; and consulting services to students, educators, and researchers, the MBC encourages new approaches to analytically- and computationally-enhance biomedical and life science research while promoting collaboration between universities, the federal and state governments (including the US Food and Drug’s National Center for Toxicological Research and the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority), industry partners (Sun Microsystems, Oracle, etc.) and entrepreneurial efforts (e.g., Phylogenetix Laboratories is considering relocating to Arkansas to have access to MBC staff).
Through supporting a highly-diverse student body (more than half of the bioinformatics graduate students are female and/or underrepresented minorities) and providing training in rapidly-growing, highly-skilled areas, future bioinformaticists will be able to support the economic development of Arkansas and the region with skills that are highly valued in a variety of industries (e.g., training in informatics is important in many non-biological companies such as Acxiom).
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