Administrative Core

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

The Administrative Core of the Center of Excellence (CoE) serves as an organizational hub, providing leadership and coordinating the activities of the Community Development and Education Core (CDEC), Model and Data Sharing Core (MDSC), three Research Projects (RP), and the broader Infectious and Immune-mediated Disease (IID) modeling community. The Administrative Core is led by a computational immunologist and an experimental immunologist with leadership experience and complementary scientific expertise. They are assisted by staff with significant experience in grants administration, financial management, team science, and project management. The Core is responsible for ensuring that the CoE fulfills its goals of driving research innovation in bridging models at different scales and coordinating multiscale modeling research across the IID community. To achieve this, the Core will provide organizational, administrative, and scientific leadership, provide fiscal management and stewardship, promote integration within the Center and across the IID community, administer the Opportunity Fund, and develop strategic and tactical plans to pivot to a disease outbreak. Functionally, the Core provides oversight of administrative procedures, regulatory compliance, communications, and scientific activities, provides project management services to the MDSC, CDEC, and RP, manages the CoE budget and finances, including tracking expenditures and balances for each core and RP, and coordinates with the Internal Advisory Committee (IAC), External Advisory Committee (EAC) and NIAID to ensure effective governance of CoE resources. The Core will coordinate with the NIAID Project Scientist to accomplish CoE program goals, discussing projects to be funded through the Opportunity Funds, and scheduling bimonthly teleconferences with the CoE leadership team. The Core facilitates integration within the CoE and across the IID community by ensuring that resources and infrastructure developed by the MDSC and CDEC are widely disseminated and optimally utilized. Within the CoE, the Core convenes regular meetings with the CDCEC, MDSC, and RP leaders, conducts team science training sessions, and organizes the annual offsite retreat. For the broader IID modeling community, the Core disburses the Opportunity Funds to encourage innovation in multiscale modeling, works with the MDSC to develop informatics infrastructure to advance FAIR principles for multiscale data and models as well as leverage generative AI to democratize access to immunology databases, and coordinates with the CDEC to provide monthly multiscale modeling webinars, offer mentored scholars programs, provide navigation services to link computational and experimental collaborators, develop the IID model network (IIDMN) online community, and organize the annual conference. Overall, the Administrative Core will provide the leadership, support, and coordination necessary to create multiscale modeling communities, democratize access to data, improve model reusability, develop innovative bridging frameworks, and train the next generation of researchers.