National Evolutionary Synthesis Center - 2008 Renewal Application To Nsf And Supporting Documents
Creators: name: Smith, Kathleen
name: Vision, Todd
name: Wiegmann, Brian
name: Kingsolver, Joel
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2008
Subjects: synthesis center
evolutionary science
grant proposal

description: <strong>PROJECT SUMMARY</strong>

NESCent, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, was first funded in 2004 to “serve the needs of the evolutionary biology community by providing mechanisms to foster synthetic, collaborative, cross- disciplinary studies” as a collaborative venture of Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. In its first 4 years NESCent has brought over 2300 scientists to the Center, and has funded over 120 group meetings, 21 postdocs and 38 sabbatical and other visiting scholars largely through a community driven proposal process. It has established a vibrant in-house community of scientists and informatics specialists, and has supported activities leading to over 100 publications covering virtually all aspects of evolutionary biology. NESCent has taken the lead in developing evoinformatics. It has provided the leadership in establishing a major collaboration with evolutionary biology journals and societies to develop Dryad, a digital data repository for evolutionary biology. NESCent has sponsored hackathons to expand the interoperability of open source software tools for evolutionary biology, and offered a number of training opportunities in evoinformatics. NESCent has established a wide variety of partnerships with major groups in evolutionary biology and education. The Center offers a number of programs targeted towards increasing participation of underserved groups, and has leveraged its impact by developing partnerships with over 100 different organizations.

In the next five years NESCent proposes to extend its contributions by continuing the most successful current programs and adding a number of new programs that include:


	Introducing targeted initiatives that will jumpstart 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.
	Encouraging major initiatives that combine individual programs such as sabbaticals, postdocs and working groups around integrated topics to reap the benefits of synergistic activity.
	Funding an expanded role for graduate students in its synthetic science programs.
	With the community, identifying new areas for major cyberinfrastructure initiatives in evolutionary biology such as visualization.
	Developing new programs to more aggressively recruit those from underserved groups to participate in evolutionary biology, and to more effectively and broadly 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 to establish a rigorous approach to assess the Center’s work and understand its impact in scientific progress and role in culture change.


<strong>Intellectual merit</strong>

The intellectual merit of the Center rests in the strength of the peer-reviewed sponsored science program, which has a demonstrated ability to produce innovative, high-impact, synthetic research products. It has taken the lead in developing cyberinfrastructure that promotes the integration of tools and data within evolutionary biology and across biological disciplines. As a Center NESCent can uniquely work to build collaborative research communities, foster a culture of data sharing, and partner with organizations all over the world.

<strong>Broader impacts</strong>

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 activities – science, informatics and education.