Behind the Curtain at TCG

LAMHDI Exhibits at Immunology 2011

TCG's LAMHDI Team--Judith Turner, Matt Travers, and Haig Evans-Kavaldjian--manned an exhibit at Immunology 2011, the 98th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Immunologists in San Francisco, May 14th-17th. The conference, which is the largest annual immunology meeting worldwide, featured over 100 exhibitors and a scientific program with more than 550 speakers in over 100 sessions covering the latest in immunology and related fields. In addition, over 1,600 poster presenters shared their latest findings. Chris Mungall of Lawrence Berkely Labs presented the LAMHDI scientific poster. TCG built and is maintaining LAMHDI--the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human DIsease--for the National Center for Research Resources under contract number HHSN268200800014C.

LAMHDI Exhibits at Experimental Biology Conference

LAMHDI, the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human DIsease, exhibited at the recent Experimental Biology conference at the Washington Convention Center in DC. The conference attracted well over 10,000 researchers, students, exhibitors, and practitioners, many of whom visited the LAMHDI booth and attended the LAMHDI scientific poster exposition. Researchers associated with the initiative also were invited to present LAMHDI at the veterinarians' networking lunch. The conference was sponsored by six scientific societies: American Association of Anatomists (AAA); The American Physiological Society (APS); American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB); American Society for Investigative Pathology (ASIP); American Society for Nutrition (ASN); and the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). TCG built and is maintaining LAMHDI for the National Center for Research Resources under contract number HHSN268200800014C.

TCG Spreads the Word at the Society for Neuroscience Conference

TCG is helping its clients get the word out about the projects we manage for them. TCG staff worked alongside scientists to present two of our scientific-collaboration projects to the 30,000 people attending the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego in mid-November. Both LAMHDI, the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human DIsease, and NITRC, the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse, had booths in the conference center. There they spoke with hundreds of attendees, handed out information about the two online services funded by the NIH, and demonstrated new functionality.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC.org) facilitates finding and comparing neuroimaging resources for functional and structural neuroimaging analyses—including popular tools as well as those that once might have been hidden in another researcher's laboratory or some obscure corner of cyberspace. NITRC collects and points to standardized information about tools, making the task of finding and comparing them easier than before. Awarded "Best Overall" for Excellence.Gov 2009, the NITRC site helps researchers find the right functional or structural neuroimaging tool or resource and provides information so scientists can determine the tools' utility for their work.

LAMHDI.org, the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human DIsease, accelerates the research process by providing biomedical scientists with a simple, comprehensive Web-based resource to find the best animal models for their research. The site is provided by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources, as part of its support for researchers.

LAMHDI News

The LAMHDI project (http://lamhdi.org) held its second invitation-only Animal Models and Human Disease Conference August 17-19 in Bethesda. A total of 23 scientists from universities across the country, NIH project officers from several Institutes and Centers, and TCG staff discussed ways the LAMHDI resource could be made even more useful to human-disease researchers. Future work will include adding visualization and beefing up communication, focusing on infectious diseases, neuroscience, and drug development.

LAMHDI, the initiative to Link Animal Models to Human Disease, is a project of the NIH's National Center for Research Resources under contract number HHSN268200800014C. It allows researchers to find appropriate animal models with a single search across five species: mice, zebrafish, rats, yeast, and flies. Other species are being added regularly. The site also offers a search of PrimateLit, the database of literature about non-human primates, as it relates to non-human primate models of human disease.

LAMHDI News

LAMHDI has a new release, and has included information from the Rat Genome Database in its searchable animal models, and has added functionality that allows users to search PrimateLit for information on non-human primate models. LAMHDI has a booth at the Zebrafish Development conference in Madison, WI this week.

Also, we added Micah Adams to the LAMHDI tech team.

Global Warming Can Cause Snow!

Watching the evening news, I saw yet another person ponder the unusually cold weather and claim "I thought global warming was supposed to be a bigger deal...".  Here's the fun fact: global warming causes amazing new patterns of snow and heat, consistent to what we are witnessing now.  How?

Take a look at the double pendulum simulator at: http://www.myphysicslab.com/dbl_pendulum.html .  Global warning represents a shift of the pendulum a bit to the right, so grab the middle ball and move it to the right.  You'll notice that the bottom ball swings rather wildly.  The more you disturb the middle ball, the more wildly the second ball swings.  This chaotic behavior is seen with a pendulum with only two balls.

Now realize that the Earth's weather is like a pendulum with billions of balls.  If you add more energy (through global warming) you'll end up with gigantic chaotic behavior with balls swinging more to the left (colder) and to the right (hotter) than usual as well as the average of the balls moving to the right (the actual global warming).  So instead of thinking, "hey, it's unusually cold, that means global warming is false," after looking at the double pendulum I suggest you consider: "hey, it's unusually cold, they may be right..."

"Facebook" for scientists to be developed

The NIH has funded a new initiative to create a "Facebook for scientists." The $12.2 million/2 year grant was awarded to a consortium of seven universities, led by the University of Florida, to develop a web resource that will pull together information about faculty and staff, published articles, and information provided by researchers. The initiative will use VIVO, a "networking template" from Cornell.

The schools involved are Cornell University, Indiana University, University of Florida, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research, Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. Their roles are detailed in Cornell's press release on the news:

Cornell will spearhead the development of the multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida will focus on developing technology for keeping each site’s data current; and Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions — Scripps Research Institute, Juniper, Fla.; Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce, P.R.; Washington University of St. Louis; and the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City — will serve as implementation sites.

The "VIVOweb" initiative, as this will be known, has enormous potential. The communities of researchers are generally eager to participate in social networks such as VIVOweb is scoped to become, as has been demonstrated by the active community surrounding NITRC and other projects in which TCG has a role.

[Disclosure: TCG participated on a competing application for this grant.]

Presentation of NITRC's Excellence.gov Award

We took a little video of (some of) the NITRC team accepting their Excellence.gov Award yesterday. Included in the video are James Luo, Nina Preuss, David Kennedy, Christian Haselgrove, and Dan Turner. Shoddy camerawork is by me (for which I apologize!).

NITRC projects wins Excellence.Gov Award!

I have some very exciting news: One of our projects has won the overall, top 2009 Excellence.Gov Award! The NIH's Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC) project was recognized for its achievements in helping researchers collaborate to develop even better tools to aid scientific discoveries.

There will be a panel presentation from all of the award winners on May 13th. Details will be announced on the ACT/IAC web site.

In the meantime, here's the press release about NITRC's award, and here are a few pictures of the happy crew!

We are incredibly proud of the NITRC project, and I'm delighted that our industry also sees the value in this great program.

Grants.gov to be updated in 90-120 days

Jason Miller at Federal News Radio posted an update to our story last week about OMB's concerns over Grants.gov's ability to handle the expected surge in grant applications:

"The Department of Health and Human Services expects to upgrade the Grants.gov site in the next 90-to-120 days, well into the surge in applications expected from the Recovery act.
"Sheila Conley, HHS's deputy assistant secretary for finance and acting deputy assistant secretary for grants, says she and other senior officials throughout government are concerned about the time it will take to improve the centralized federal Web site to find and apply for grants."

There's also a recognition that some thinking needs to go into how Grants.gov develops over the next several months:

'"We need to begin our effort to plan out the next generation of Grants.gov," she says. "We have to take advantage of the acceptance and successes of Grants.gov. We will look across an interagency group to build off well accepted concept and make that work. It will be not long after we stabilize the current environment."'

Certainly a step in the right direction.