FYI Research:
Grant to enable construction of evolutionary biology center

What do you get when you cross an anthropologist, a geologist, an entomologist and a computer scientist?

Give us a few years, and we'll give you the answer. Carolina, Duke and N.C. State universities have just won a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to transform an old cotton mill building on Ninth Street in Durham into a National Evolutionary Synthesis Center. The center, called NESCent for short, will allow researchers from a flock of different disciplines -- from all over the world -- to put their heads together in an attempt to answer some big questions in evolutionary biology.

Take the Tree of Life, for example. It's a long-standing, ambitious project to map the evolutionary history and characteristics of all the organisms on Earth. Such a goal now seems within reach, because relatively recent advances in molecular biology, genomics and information technology might allow scientists to see connections among different kinds of evolutionary data, and to identify where the gaps in that data are.

But unless you bring the right scientists together and give them access to all the right data, say the scientists behind NESCent, projects such as the Tree of Life might never flower.

"Information about biological evolution has exploded in the past several decades, fueled by advances in biodiversity, computation, genomics and many other fields," says Joel Kingsolver, professor of biology at Carolina and NESCent's associate director for science and synthesis. "There is so much information. How do you put it together?"

For starters, NESCent will develop a language that will allow a number of disparate scientific information databases to "talk" to each other. Dan Reed, Carolina's vice chancellor for Information Technology, will lead NESCent's computing strategy. Researchers might then be able to draw some big-picture conclusions by analyzing more types of data from more sources than ever before.

Clifford Cunningham, NESCent's director and a professor of biology at Duke, says that evolutionary biologists have tended to concentrate on their own specific disciplines. NESCent hopes that bringing together all kinds of scientists -- including philosophers and historians who study evolution -- will lead to big advances in evolutionary studies.

NESCent will have an outreach program to communicate scientific results to the public and to policymakers. The center also will train young scientists and will help teachers develop lesson plans about evolution.

"Getting NESCent here was quite a coup, and a real comment on how strong these three universities in the Triangle are, especially in evolution," says David Pfennig, professor of biology at Carolina.

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center is online at www.nescent.org.

Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle. Writer: Jason Smith.

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