Peter Arzberger, Ph.D.

As the Director of the Life Sciences Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, I work with cognizant faculty and all units on campus to coordinate initiatives on campus and in the community to advance the goals of UCSD in the era of genome-enabled science as well as in densely sensed environment. This involves working across the interface of biomedical research and computing and information technologies, their researchers and research units, to bring individuals together for focus on opportunities in a coordinated fashion. One particular responsibility is as Deputy Layer Leader for a key thrust of the new California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (www.calit2.net), the biomedical layer termed Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine.

I am the Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resources (http://nbcr.net), an NIH National Center for Research Resource award. NBCR typifies the merging of computing and information technologies to catalyze and facilitate biomedical research across a broad range of biological scales. Its goal is to bring to the national biomedical research community end-to-end tools and techniques from the growing cyberinfrastructure. NBCR produces tools and services for the biomedical community.to better address researchers’ issues that involve multiple scales. Furthermore, NBCR has helped to coordinate activities of several computational, informational, and visualization resources (nbcr.net/pub/NCRR-Proj-2004.pdf)

Internationally, there is much to be gained from working with colleagues to help develop that cyberinfrastructure. In 2002, I helped establish the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) which is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). PRAGMA’s goal is to build sustained collaborations between researchers around the Pacific Rim by building applications on top of the immerging grid hardware and software (www.pragma-grid.net). As of November 2004, PRAGMA consists of 23 institutions around the Pacific Rim. I serve as Chair of the PRAGMA Steering Committee.

In 2004, I helped initiate the Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences (PRIME, prime.ucsd.edu) which provides opportunities for UCSD undergraduates to conduct an internship at a PRAGMA site. PRIME was initiated with funding from NSF, with additional support from Cal-(IT)².

Another outgrowth of PRAGMA, in particular the EcoGrid (ecogrid.nchc.org.tw) activity of the National Center for High-performance Computing (www.nchc.gov.tw/) in Taiwan is the Lake Metabolism project (lakemetabolism.org). This project currently involves institutions in the United States and Taiwan, and focuses on establishing a data framework to share data. With funding from the Moore Foundation, steps will be taken to extend this network to more lakes around the world, to gain a better understanding of the role lakes in the carbon cycle.

Also, I am involved with the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) (www.lternet.edu/) community, to facilitate the interaction between ecologists and computational and information scientist.

As former Executive Director of SDSC and NPACI, I helped coordinate local computational biology activities and was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. Before coming to the UCSD campus, I worked at the National Science Foundation, as program director of the Computational Biology Program in BIO and program director of the Statistics and Probability program in MPS, and as Deputy NSF High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Coordinator.

11/27/2004

This Resource is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through a National Center for Research Resources program grant (P 41 RR08605) to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), The Center for Research in Biological Systems (CRBS), The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), and Washington University in St. Louis.

National Biomedical Computation Resource
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