Current NSF Project
Innovations Through Computational Sciences
Mississippi is poised to become nationally prominent in the computational sciences. Based on a foundation built with previous EPSCoR funding, "Innovations through Computational Sciences" is building on success in high performance computing capacity, developing a core of experienced faculty leaders, and providing a strong basis for the state to become a national leader in the areas of computational biology, computational chemistry and biosystems simulation/modeling. With support from prior EPSCoR funding, collaborative research among Mississippi's largest research universities, Jackson State University (JSU), Mississippi State University (MSU), the University of Mississippi (UM) and the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), forming the Mississippi Research Consortium (MRC), has developed a research infrastructure that supports education, extends technology development, and enhances economic opportunities for the state of Mississippi. NSF EPSCoR has played a major role in supporting the mission of MRC through building of infrastructure and supporting collaborative research.
The Mississippi Computational Sciences Network (MCSN) is being established to improve communication and collaborative opportunities statewide. Mississippi computational sciences research has been ongoing through inter-institutional collaborative research and has a resource base for building capacities in these areas. We are building a network of expertise that will collectively and cooperatively interface computational science and engineering/high performance computing with specific areas in the life sciences including computational biology, computational chemistry, and biosystem simulation/modeling. Mississippi is on the cusp of being nationally competitive in these disciplines. A major barrier to the growth of the computational sciences infrastructure in Mississippi has been difficulty in recruiting and retaining sufficient high quality faculty to build a core of competitive teams of researchers and attracting excellent graduate students and support staff to support the research enterprise in the universities and in spin-off or partner companies. The state has the high performance computing capacity and leadership in senior faculty in computational science and engineering and is utilizing EPSCoR support to increase the number of faculty who will be competitive in the theme areas in the national arena.
Goals and Objectives
The overall objective of our project is to establish a national prominence in the computational sciences by enhancing research capacity (to achieve national competitiveness) in computational sciences building on the existing strengths in high performance computing. Three focus areas, building on collaborations developed with previous EPSCoR support, are computational biology, computational chemistry, and multi-scale biosystem simulation/modeling. In addition to supporting these research areas, activities are being initiated to create linkages leading to a more fully integrated computational sciences community.
Specific goals include the following:
- Building a national prominence in the theme area of computational sciences.
- Increasing research capacity resulting in national competitiveness in computational
sciences by the following strategies:
- Recruitment of outstanding new faculty with competitive "start-up packages,"
- Support and mentoring of new and existing faculty in interdisciplinary computational sciences research,
- Recruitment of excellent graduate students, and
- Enhancement of computational science infrastructure (equipment and support staff).
- Expanding collaboration among MRC institutions and with outside laboratories
- Growing the pipeline in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by expanding opportunities for women and underrepresented groups in the computational sciences, increasing the number of graduate students and interfacing with K-12 teachers and students.
- Fostering the economic development of the state and nation through development of intellectual property in the computational science area and its commercialization to new spin-off or to partner companies.