National Evolutionary Synthesis Center

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) was established in 2004 to serve the needs of the evolutionary biology community by providing mechanisms to foster synthetic, collaborative, cross-disciplinary studies. It is run by a consortium of three universities in the North Carolina Research Triangle - Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University. This award will renew NESCent's support for an additional five years. To date, NESCent has established a vibrant in-house community of scientists and informatics specialists, taken the lead in developing evo-informatics, established a wide variety of partnerships with major groups in evolutionary biology and education, and developed diverse programs targeted to increase participation of underserved groups. Over the next five years, NESCent will continue its core missions of enabling synthetic research, developing and disseminating new tools for evolutionary informatics, and increasing the public understanding of evolution. It will continue ongoing activities while initiating new programs that will increase its focus, build new teams of scientists to effect synthesis, and enhance its training and educational activities. Targeted initiatives will enable new areas of evolutionary synthesis, including areas important to human affairs such as climate change, health and disease, and areas of broad interdisciplinary scope such as cultural evolution. Major initiatives are proposed that combine individual programs such as sabbaticals, postdocs and working groups around a common topic to promote synthesis. NESCent will support graduate fellowships that will provide training in synthesis, and pursue new areas for major cyberinfrastructure initiatives in evolutionary biology such as visualization. New programs are proposed to recruit underserved groups to participate in evolutionary biology, and to communicate the science produced at the Center to the education community and general public. Collaborating with social scientists studying the nature of scientific collaborations and networks, the center will establish a rigorous approach to assess its work and understand its impact on scientific progress and its role in promoting new, potentially transformative results through synthesis. All of NESCent's activities are directed towards supporting the broader evolutionary biology community in its pursuit of synthetic evolutionary biology. NESCent promotes changes in the culture of collaboration and data sharing, and facilitates the development, building and consensus of scientific communities that are essential for truly transformative research. NESCent provides critical infrastructure, in terms of funding, logistics, physical space, and informatics to allow new synthetic breakthroughs. It provides new cyberinfrastructure resources to the entire evolutionary biology community. It offers a wide variety of training and outreach activities aimed at the general public, the citizen scientist, the student, the educator and the practicing evolutionary biologist. It devotes significant effort into recruiting individuals from groups under represented in evolutionary biology into all its core activities. NESCent Products: https://www.nescent.org/sites/public_documents/Main_Page