TY - CHAP
T1 - Computing and Genomics at Illinois
AU - Robinson, Gene E.
N1 - Funding Information:
CompGen quickly took shape. A strong partnership was developed between CSL and IGB to run the initiative on behalf of the campus. Thanks to generous support from several parts of campus, numerous graduate fellowships were awarded for projects co-supervised by biologists and faculty from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. Our goal was to build a robust research community in which the computer scientists and engineers understand the nature of the diverse biology problems that require innovative computational genomics tools, and the genomic biologists understand the growth points in computer science and engineering that could lead to powerful new tools.
Funding Information:
The CompGen Initiative achieved its overarching goal and so we ended it in 2021. In its nine-year existence, the CompGen Initiative incubated and launched collaborations that garnered over 15 million dollars in federal and industry funding and contributed substantially to the Illinois research enterprise. CompGen Fellows seeded many new research projects that resulted in publications, patents, and grants. For example, several CompGen faculty and trainees including Ravi, me and Ravi’s student Zachary Stephens collaborated on a paper entitled, “Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical?,” which showed that the projected future needs in computational genomics exceed even those of astronomy, YouTube, and Twitter. Published in 2015 in PLoS Biology, the paper already has accumulated more than one thousand citations. In addition to the NSF MRI grant mentioned above, the CompGen Initiative spawned two campus-wide center grants: a National Institutes of Health Big Data to Knowledge Center of Excellence, and the NSF Center for Computational Biology and Genomic Medicine (CCBGM), led by Ravi and Liewei Wang from the Mayo Clinic, established in 2017.
Funding Information:
Ravi finished his VCR term in 2012, and he was then ready to focus more on developing the CompGen Initiative. An opportunity soon presented itself when campus announced the annual Request for Proposals from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program later that year. We quickly recruited outstanding colleagues—Victor Jongeneel, Steven Lumetta, and Saurabh Sinha—and Ravi inspired us with an exciting vision for a new computing system involving hardware and software to improve the speed of handling and analysis of genomic data. The grant was awarded, and the CompGen Initiative was off and running!
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Professor Ravishankar Iyer’s long and impactful career has led to major advances in computer engineering, especially the design and validation of dependable computing systems. This volume, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, honors the many ways that Ravi has contributed to his field, with leadership, vision, and accomplishment. Here, I tell the story of Ravi’s significant impact on improving the computational infrastructure for the life and medical sciences.
AB - Professor Ravishankar Iyer’s long and impactful career has led to major advances in computer engineering, especially the design and validation of dependable computing systems. This volume, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, honors the many ways that Ravi has contributed to his field, with leadership, vision, and accomplishment. Here, I tell the story of Ravi’s significant impact on improving the computational infrastructure for the life and medical sciences.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135403735&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85135403735&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-02063-6_25
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-02063-6_25
M3 - Foreword/postscript
AN - SCOPUS:85135403735
SN - 9783031020629
SN - 9783031020650
T3 - Springer Series in Reliability Engineering
SP - 425
EP - 427
BT - System Dependability and Analytics
A2 - Wang, Long
A2 - Pattabiraman, Karthik
A2 - Di Martino, Catello
A2 - Athreya, Arjun
A2 - Bagchi, Saurabh
PB - Springer
ER -