Gwen Jacobs - US grants

9411967 Jacobs Science can make great progress when the knowledge acquired within one discipline is organized and made accessible for detailed analysis. Just as molecular genetics has made great strides since the introduction of electronic databases cataloguing the sequences of genes from animals used in research, neuroscience would be advanced if appropriate databases were made available to researchers. In this proposal, Dr. Gwen Jacobs outlined a series of workshops in which neurobiologists and information scientists will gather to determine how to institute electronic databases of individually identifiable nerve cells. Databases for several different research organisms are now possible, and might include detailed structural, physiological, neurochemical, and genetic information about each cell. The databases would advance studies of brain cell function, or the behavior of neural networks. This electronically stored information could be made available over internet to aid both researchers and educators. ***

Many sensory systems have some kind of representation in the brain that seems to form a kind of spatial map. One well-studied case of this is a map of directional responses from the tiny wind-sensitive hairs on organs called cerci at the back end of a cricket, which has been used as a relatively simple model system. The nerve fibers carrying information from these cerci come in to a central cluster called a ganglion that is part of the animal's central nervous system. Crickets, like many other invertebrates, often have single nerve cells that are characteristically identifiable from animal to animal, so it is possible to construct an atlas of such identifiable neurons, and relate their activity to the behavior of the animal, such as turning toward or away from a stimulus. This project builds on an existing large database of identified neurons in this system, to add dynamic properties about their physiological responses to the known spatial properties of their connectivity from the cercal inputs, and their outputs to other parts of the ganglion and the brain. Data on response properties including threshold sensitivity, frequency tuning, phase response, and rates of adaptation are incorporated and used to derive a set of mathematical functions. These functions, representing the response dynamics of the cells in the system, are projected on to the three-dimensional matrix of the spatial map. Advanced computational visualization algorithms will be implemented to represent the spatial patterns of activity within the map. The impact of this work will be not only on mechanosensory integration, but on general issues of information processing in nervous systems, combining the constraints of anatomical structure and the insights about computational algorithms used in neural maps, which allow the organism to respond with appropriate spatial behavior to environmental signals.

This award will support the development advanced software tools for establishing a database containing information about the structural and dynamic functional attributes of identified neurons, and the development of advanced software tools for querying that database for information about the global functional organization of neuronal ensembles. The visual format of the databases developed with these tools will be multidimensional "atlases", which preserve the spatial relationships between all objects within the nervous systems. These project will be carried out as a collaborative effort between a group of neurobiologists and computer scientists at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California. The major specific aims are to develop a general database engine capable of representing information about the functionally relevant neuronal attributes of the objects (such as their biochemical, biophysical, genetic and developmental characteristics); the 3D anatomical parameters of neural structures across multiple resolution scales; the functional characteristics of these objects which determine their individual "input/output" properties; and the functional relations between neuronal objects which determine their dynamic interactions; to develop advanced software tools for inserting the anatomical, functional and relational information into the database and to develop advanced query tools for retrieving and analyzing the data.

A confocal microscope system will be purchased for studies on such problems as the functional organization of neurons within a sensory system, the developmental mechanisms involved in neuronal and glial differentiation, the nature of the neural code, i.e., the algorithms through which information is encoded in neuronal spike trains, the functional organization of the anterior pituitary, the migration of cells on and through basement membranes in multicellular organisms, interactions between the cell surface of fungi and host tissues and the structural, elemental and molecular preservation of dinosaur tissues.

This award is made under the high performance connections portion of ANIR's "Connections to the Internet" announcement, NSF 96-64. It provides partial support for two years for a DS-3 connection to the vBNS. Applications include projects in computational biology, physics and chemistry. Collaborating institutions include the University of California at San Diego, California Institute of Technology, Courant Institute, University of California at Davis, University of Tennessee, University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Wisconsin.

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research on the structure and function of complex biological systems. The program will focus on integrating knowledge and developing models of biological systems across organization levels and at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Systems to studied range from macromolecular complexes to networks of interacting nerve cells. Training will emphasize understanding complex biological systems in terms of the structures and interaction of their components, and will integrate advanced computational and mathematical approaches with a wide variety of experimental and analytical techniques. Key educational aspects are: two new, year-long, multidisciplinary courses for all students; lab rotations with a training focus, seminars in professional development and ethical practices of science, dual advisors, student involvement in collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects, a dedicated research seminar series, and intensive summer workshops led by investigators from other universities and industry. A highly productive group of faculty will participate, collectively spanning eight departments and three colleges of Montana State University-Bozeman. In conjunction with existing, successful MSU programs, special efforts are planned to increase the number of Native American students pursuing doctoral degrees in the biological sciences.

IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to facilitate the establishment of innovative, research-based graduate programs that will train a diverse group of scientists and engineers to be well-prepared to take advantage of a broad spectrum of career options. IGERT provides doctoral institutions with an opportunity to develop new, well-focussed multidisciplinary graduate programs that transcend organizational boundaries and unite faculty from several departments or institutions to establish a highly interactive, collaborative environment for both training and research. In this second year of the program, awards are being made to twenty-one institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. This specific award is supported by funds from the Directorates for Biological Sciences, for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and for Education and Human Resources.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): A grand challenge in neuroscience is to understand the biological basis of information processing at the cellular and network levels. One major technological barrier to continuing progress is the lack of adequate informatics and analysis tools to enable exploration of the structural organization of complex neural circuits, the discovery and understanding of emergent properties of neural ensembles, the formulation of quantitative hypotheses about neural computation, and the testing of those hypotheses experimentally. We have developed a prototype database system that provides many of the needed capabilities, and have used this software system to study mechanisms underlying neural encoding. The general goals of the work proposed here are to extend the capabilities and general utility of this prototype system, to interface the database with several additional tools for the analysis of structural and time-series data, and to enable more effective data sharing between remote collaborators. The core informatics and neuroscience research will be carried out by a group of researchers at Montana State University. Collaborations have also been established with researchers at several other research institutions, to insure interoperability of our system with other data collection and analysis tools and to facilitate the testing and refinement of our system. The investigator and co-investigators are all funded through NIH to study dynamic aspects of sensory processing at the cellular and network levels in a variety of preparations, including the cat and monkey visual systems. The researchers all share the following general neuroscience research aims: a) to understand the relationships between spatio-temporal activity patterns in neural ensembles and the information they convey, b) to understand how the spatio-temporal patterns at one processing stage are decoded at the next processing stage, c) to understand how computations are carried out on that decoded information, and d) to understand the mechanisms through which the observed dynamical patterns emerge from the morphology, synaptic connectivity, and intrinsic biophysical characteristics of the neurons in the ensembles. The software tools developed here will be applied to these ongoing studies, enabling a substantial increase in the breadth, depth, rigor, and rate of progress of those research projects. That neuroscience research will, in turn, provide a rigorous basis for the refinement, generalization and extension of the informatics tools.

A fundamental question in neuroscience is how natural sensory stimuli are encoded for information handling by the brain. Invertebrate animals often offer systems that are in some ways simpler than those of mammals, and including such features as identifiable single cells in networks of relatively few numbers. This collaborative project exploits a sensory system called the cercal system of the cricket, in which small appendages on the rear of the body contain fine hairs that are used to detect, identify and localize behaviorally relevant air current movements, such as those produced by a predator. The input from roughly 2000 receptor cells converges on 30 local interneurons and only 20 output interneurons that lead to behavior such as escape. Three collaborators at two institutions use computational and mathematical analyses of a database of anatomical and physiological measurements on the 'dynamic map' that does the central processing in the brain of the peripheral signals. The goals are to characterize the representation of dynamic sensory stimulus parameters at two processing stages within the mapped sensory system, and to examine the mechanisms that transform the representation at the interface between these two processing stages.
Results will be important for our understanding of information representation in nervous systems, particularly in dynamic processing. The project also will enhance the independent career of a woman faculty member in mathematics, and students will receive multi-disciplinary, highly quantitative training related to biology, in two states that do not currently have high profiles in federally funded research.

A grand challenge in neuroscience is to understand the biological basis of information processing at the cellular and network levels. One major technology barrier to continuing progress is the lack of adequate informatics and analysis tools to enable exploration of the structural organization of complex neural circuits, the discovery and understanding of emergent properties of neural ensembles, the formulation of quantitative hypotheses about neural computation, and the testing of those hypotheses experimentally. These scientists have developed a prototype database system that provides many of the needed capabilities, and have used this software system to study mechanisms underlying neural encoding. The general goals of the work proposed here are to extend the capabilities and general utility of this prototype system, to interface the database with several additional tools for the analysis of structural and time-series data, and to enable more effective data sharing between remote collaborators. The core informatics and neuroscience research will be carried out by a group of researchers at Montana State University. Collaborations have also been established with researchers at several other research institutions, to insure interoperability of this system with other data collections and analysis tools and to facilitate the testing and refinement of this system. The PI and co-investigators all study dynamic aspects of sensory processing at the cellular and network levels in a variety of preparations, including the cricket, cat, and monkey visual systems. The researchers all share the following general neuroscience research aims: a) to understand the relationships between spatio-temporal activity patterns in neural ensembles and the information they convey, b) to understand how the spatio-temporal patterns at one processing stage are decoded at the next processing stage, c) to understand how computations are carried out on that decoded morphology, synaptic connectivity, and intrinsic biophysical characteristics of the neurons in the ensembles. The software tools developed here will be applied to these ongoing studies, enabling a substantial increase in the breadth, depth, rigor, and rate of progress of those research projects. That neuroscience research will, in turn, provide a rigorous basis for the refinement, generalization and extension of the informatics tools.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We will develop and implement a plan to provide a high-speed telecommunications network for biomedical researchers in the group of six rural states currently on the other side of the geographical digital divide. This Western BRIN InfoNet will enable scientists and educators in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming to take advantage of the wealth of remote research resources and expertise available to scientists in other areas of the country. The Western BRIN InfoNet will serve as an instrument supporting educational and research needs and will bring this region with its highly valuable intellectual capital into the mainstream of American science and healthcare delivery, as enjoyed elsewhere in our country. The Western BRIN InfoNet will provide cyber lnfrastructure capable connectivity, eliminate crippling chokepoints, ensure scalable growth, and allow dedicated bandwidth where needed. Our project will create two types of Grids: 1) a research network composed of biomedical researchers whose productivity will be increased through collaboration, training and access to research tools, and 2) a physical communications network created by upgrading the network connectivity of BRIN-Grid sites to both the University of Washington's major health sciences research facilities, and to a de facto 'BRIN-hub' at the Pacific NorthWest Gigapop (PNWGP) in Seattle. Thus, this project will address two key issues: providing access to resources and building networks in the community. The importance of high-speed network infrastructure in supporting a wide range of science and educational objectives has been well identified and numerous national and international examples stand as exemplars. Within the United States, our research and educational communities are well served by Internet2 and its Abilene high-speed backbone. Today's research and educational communities have come to recognize and embrace the use of high-speed networks as key components in their suite of instruments essential to meeting their objectives. The states in the Western BRIN region are not equipped with state-of-the art network infrastructure, and the establishment of the Western BRIN InfoNet will bring the western region on par with its peers.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal is a supplement to our current Human Brain Project Phase I Grant # NIH-NIMH R01MH064416 titled NeuroSys: Neuroinformatics for Neural Systems. The goal of this current Phase I project is to develop a semi-structured database environment that will a) enable neuroscience researchers to construct and maintain their own in-lab databases for anatomical and time-series data, and b) enhance their ability to exchange data and analysis tools with their collaborators at different sites. [unreadable] We propose to extend and enhance our project in 3 specific areas: [unreadable] 1. We will build and administer a centralized meta-data cache to service multiple user groups, in order to create an environment that fosters, encourages and accelerates the grass-roots evolution of commonly accepted controlled vocabularies (http://dublincore.org) for describing data in several sub-disciplines of Neuroscience. [unreadable] 2. We will administer the NeuroSys Database Project as a public, fully functional open-source community; to enable contributions of software modules from other interested members of the Neuroscience community. [unreadable] 3. We will accelerate the development of several crucial software components, to allow an easier release of a prototype system to an extended group of interested users. [unreadable] This project will address the growing need to provide mechanisms for biomedical researchers to be able to annotate the data produced in their own laboratories promote collaboration among investigators and enable data sharing among members of the neuroscience and general biomedical research community [unreadable] [unreadable]

An implicit hypothesis underlying much recent research in neuroscience and neuroethology is that sensory systems have evolved, through natural selection, toward optimal functional performance and/or energetic efficiency. However, it has proven extremely difficult to derive precise definitions for functional optimality and efficiency, and even more difficult to determine the nature and relative importance of different factors that might be constraining this process of optimization. A multidisciplinary group of researchers lead by Dr. Gedeon will develop a theoretical framework for defining and assessing optimality of one specific sensory system and are also carrying out experiments to assess its optimality and efficiency.
The system they are studying is the cercal sensory system of the cricket, Acheta domesticus. This system functions as a low-frequency, near-field extension of the animal's auditory system, and mediates the detection, localization and identification of signals generated by predators, mates and competitors. The sense organ for this system consists of a pair of antenna-like 'cerci' at the rear of the cricket's body, each of which is covered with approximately 1000 mechanosensory hairs. Each of these hairs is attached to a single nerve cell. The group's working hypothesis is that the biomechanical and neurophysiological characteristics of these receptor organs are optimized for the sensory processing operations they mediate. The researchers will determine the extent and nature of optimization in the array of mechanosensory hairs and receptors, and will also identify specific constraints under which the optimization has taken place. For example, they will determine whether the physical structures of the hairs are matched to behaviorally relevant air-current signals and also determine if the global configuration of the ensemble of hairs on the two cerci reflects optimization with respect to sensitivity, robustness to noise, and/or to the detection of specific types of signals having particular behavioral importance, such as those from predators. They will also characterize constraints on optimization related to biomechanics, resource utilization, and efficiency of subsequent processing operations. These aims are being achieved through a combination of mathematical analysis, computer simulation, quantitative morphometric analysis of the sensory structures, and neurophysiological experiments.
Graduate students in Mathematics and Neuroscience will be involved in the project, and an interdisciplinary graduate-level course is being developed that focuses on optimality in neural systems. Further, in collaboration with the American Indian Research Opportunities program at Montana State University, Native American students at the undergraduate and pre-college levels will carry out many of the experiments and associated data analysis.

The Big Sky Leadership Initiative (BSLI) will advance women as research leaders via a
sustainable, tiered and cascading system of mentoring and professional development. The
BSLI draws on Montana State University's existing strengths, its prominent interdisciplinary
research centers and crosscutting programs, its well-positioned senior women faculty in sciences
and engineering, to develop an innovative system for mentoring women scientists, social
scientists and engineers at different career stages and transition points. Each track of the BSLI has
specific goals and contributes to a systemic and sustainable program. Senior women will enter
into formal mentoring relationships with research leaders at outside institutions who have
extensive experience developing and maintaining complex research centers. In turn, this network
of senior women will mentor early-to-mid-career women faculty, providing them opportunities to
develop their research and introducing them to the organizational structures through which
interdisciplinary research is accomplished. BSLI also includes an integrated series of four two-day, intensive leadership development workshops on a variety of topics of importance to scientists and engineers. Formative and summative evaluation and dissemination of the program results are included.

The University of California at San Diego is awarded funds to organize a workshop in Arlington, VA, from August 29-30, 2006 on Petascale computing in the Biosciences. The goal is to jumpstart collaborations between computer scientists and computational bioscientists thereby enabling efficient and early use of petascale computing resources as they come online. The workshop will promote meaningful information exchange between the two domains; it will be structured as a tutorial; bioscientists will describe their applications along with the computational challenges they present; computer scientists will describe their methods and tools for improving application performance and capability. There will be concrete actions identified out of the workshop, such as development of collaborative projects for algorithm and model development. These will be included in the workshop report. The objective is that investigators in both fields are better positioned to use emerging petascale high performance systems.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Several major technological barriers obstruct progress toward answering fundamental questions in basic and clinical neuroscience. One principal barrier is the lack of effective mechanisms for neuroscientists and clinicians to share their data with colleagues at other institutions, and to gain access to the vast resources of data that are distributed throughout the neuroscience research community. This barrier must be removed by the development of more powerful and accessible informatics tools to enable our exploration of the development, structural organization and dysfunction of our nervous system. The problems contributing to this 'informatics'barrier can be subdivided into two general categories: technical problems which limit the capabilities of existing informatics tools, and practical problems which prevent the use of those tools by the general research community. Through funding from a Phase I Human Brain Project grant, we have developed a prototype database environment that solves several of the most significant technical and practical problems. This software environment, called NeuroSys, enables neuroscience researchers to construct, maintain and extend their own in-lab databases, enhances their ability to share data and analysis tools with their collaborators at different sites, and provides an execution environment where query results on their data can be sent directly into an expandable list of advanced data analysis and simulation tools. The general goals of this project are to extend the capabilities and general utility of this prototype system, to refine the system based on intensive beta testing, and to release NeuroSys to the general scientific community.

The REU Site in Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Montana State University (MSU) is a 10-week summer research program for students with an interest in biological science but little or no research experience. Students will learn the joys and challenges of scientific research by working on projects in cell development, cell biology or neurobiology. The program consists of an initial 2 week hands-on lab session that will teach participants important biological research techniques. For the remaining 8 weeks, students will use these newly learned skills by working in the lab of a faculty member on a research project. Students will also participate in workshops on scientific ethics and careers, and will have the opportunity to make a poster presentation of their work and present their research at campus summer student symposium at the end of the program. Minority, first-generation college students and students who attended high schools in rural areas are especially encouraged to apply. MSU is located in Bozeman, MT, about 80 miles north of Yellowstone National Park. Over 200 students participate in various undergraduate research programs on the MSU campus each summer, making MSU an invigorating environment for both recreation and intellectual growth. More information is available at http://www.montana.edu/cbn/REU.html or by contacting Dr. Anneke Metz, (406) 994-7519 or at anneke@montana.edu.

EPS-0919557, University of Montana, Richard Hauer, linked to EPS-0918856 (University of Kentucky Research Foundation)
Collaborative Research: Cyberinfrastructure for a Virtual Observatory and Ecological Informatics System (VOEIS)

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

The Montana-Kentucky (MTKY) cyber consortium is a partnership of the primary research universities in the two states--University of Montana (UM), Montana State University (MtSU), University of Kentucky (UK), University of Louisville (UL), Eastern Kentucky University (EKU), Flathead Lake Biological Station (FLBS) in Montana operated by UM, Hancock Biological Station (HBS) in Kentucky operated by Murray State University (MuSU), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Cisco Systems, Inc. NCSA and Cisco.
This collaborative project between MT and KY and partners from industry and the public sector plans to develop an integrated sensor and ecological informatics system through the use of modern cyberinfrastructure resources. Through this CI project, the researchers will develop a collaborative, research-based line of inquiry and informatics framework that will function from the collection of streaming sensor data to the application of those data in simulation models and visualizations. This is to be accomplished by developing and implementing a combination of the necessary hardware, networking, software and human resources to ensure an end-to-end workflow.
Intellectual Merit. The research carried out by the cyberinfrastructure will enable an integrated sensor and informatics network in the nature of a pilot project which will develop expertise in environmental science of importance in the future competitiveness of Montana and Kentucky. The consortium team, composed of faculty and students at Flathead Lake Biological Station (MT), Hancock Biological Station (KY) and research and education centers at four universities in Kentucky and two in Montana, will contribute to the design, development and application of this network. The informatics system developed through this project would be designed to manage vast amounts of legacy data, as well as new data generated by the sensor network. Data will be analyzed through a workflow environment designed in collaboration with the software experts at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana-Champaign, IL. Private sector and collaboration partner, Cisco Systems Inc., will contribute sensor and router development and resources to this effort. Visualization of the data will be carried out jointly between NCSA and the Kentucky Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments. The combination of these resources will form a cyberinfrastructure to explore fundamental questions in environmental science, including the effects of climate change, the imposition of human activities on the environment, and the resilience of the nation?s water resources.
Broader Impacts. Training of students in the use of VOEIS and the NCSA open source software is an important part of this project and will develop local expertise in sensor development, deployment and simulation. Undergraduate curricula in limnology and ecology will be designed and tested in Montana and Kentucky universities. A special effort will be made to include students from underrepresented groups (e.g., students at the seven Tribal Colleges in Montana and the economically disadvantaged students from the Appalachian counties of Kentucky). Interaction with the public and K-12 students will be channeled through the outreach programs at the Kentucky Water Resources Research Institute (KWRRI) and the Montana Water Center (MWC), which are both part of the national network of water centers. This is expected to raise the awareness of how human activities have impact on the environment.

Proposal Number: EPS -1006932

Proposal Title: Extending the Montana Northern Tier Network to Strategic Partners

Institution: University of Montana

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
(Public Law 111-5).

The Northern Tier Networking Consortium (NTNC) was formed in 2003 to extend and expand broadband and high-performance optical networks, connecting the Northern Tier to the National Research and Education Network (NREN). The goal of this Research Infrastructure Improvement Inter-Campus and Intra-Campus Cyber Connectivity project is to extend the reach and capability of the Montana University System's (MUS) newly activated owned-fiber network, the Montana Northern Tier Network (MT-NTN). Three new connection points will be built to facilitate local site connections to computational and data storage facilities in the State of Montana Miles City Data Center (MCDC), located in Miles City, Montana; and to use new and existing connection sites to create and support site connections for Montana State University-Billings (MSUB), Salish Kootenai College (SKC, a Tribal College), Miles City Community College (MCCC) and Dawson Community College (DCC).

Intellectual Merit
This extension of the MT-NTN will allow students and faculty at MSUB, SKC, MCCC, and DCC to engage in expanded undergraduate research programs through enhanced collaboration with other colleges and universities in the system. The project will also provide access for researchers in Montana to an enterprise level data storage and computational facility. Access to this facility will provide back-up, storage and disaster recovery capabilities for vast amounts of research data through a secure, high bandwidth, high capacity network. The two core research focus areas are: environmental and ecosystem science, and health and biomedical sciences. Improved connectivity would enhance the collection and streaming of data from environmental sensors to local data aggregation points and would enable real-time observation of ecosystem changes on a national network scale. The extension of the network into rural and underserved areas would support research and understanding of the health conditions that affect Montana's rural, indigenous, and lower socioeconomic populations. The investigators and other researchers would collaborate with colleagues participating in the Health Information Exchange of Montana (HIEM), a rural health network consisting of five independently owned and operated hospitals and two federal funded Community Health Centers. This collaboration is valuable as the distances in the state are very large, presenting an additional difficulty for such time-sensitive collaboration.

Broader Impacts
The project leverages ongoing diversity activities funded through current Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at Montana State University (MSU) and The University of Montana (UM). This project will increase opportunities for collaboration in research and education activities by providing on-line access to all participating institutions. Workforce development activities will be augmented in order to advance and retain Native American students from the Tribal Colleges in the STEM disciplines throughout their undergraduate and graduate careers. A research experience for undergraduates program that includes the 2-year and Tribal Colleges will be developed. Students at DCC and MCC would have the opportunity to collaborate directly with faculty and students at UM and MSU. Faculty at these institutions would have increased access to new graduate-level courses within the framework of MSU's National Teachers Enhancement Network (NTEN). The new courses, covering energy, ecology, and related topics, will become part of a permanent catalog of course offerings and establish a model for EPSCoR to nationally reach teachers of science with timely and accurate science content.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Science Montana: Engaging 4-H Teens with Bioscience Research Many Montana high school students, particularly those in rural and often isolated areas, have limited, if any, exposure to scientists and thus often lack the awareness and the role models needed to consider bioscience study and careers. The proposed project--Science Montana: Engaging 4-H Teens with Bioscience Research--will engage rural teens, address future scientific workforce needs, and leverage the extensive expertise of the state's scientists. It is an innovative partnership of three Montana State University-Bozeman (MSU) entities: the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, Extended University, and Montana 4-H within the Extension Service. In addition, the project collaborates with MSU's Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Biology Program and the NCRR-funded INBRE program. The project builds on the resources and infrastructure of the Montana 4-H program with 4-H clubs located throughout the state including Montana's seven Native American reservations. Drawing upon the research interests of MSU science faculty, the project will introduce rural teen participants to basic, applied, and translational research themes using neuroscience (basic), infectious disease (applied), and metabolomics (translational) as instructional examples. The proposed project focuses on an intensive on-campus experience followed by year-long inquiry-based activities and interaction with scientists and student mentors. It will utilize research projects, monthly videoconference lab meetings, online interactive media, and online communications to engage the 4-H participants. The project aims are: 1) engage rural Montana teens in basic, applied, and translational research in biosciences through a year-long inquiry-based learning environment;2) Increase the interest of rural Montana teens in pursuing basic and clinical bioscience research and other careers related to health sciences, particularly among populations underrepresented in bioscience professions;and 3) create a web-based repository of project content and interactive multimedia assets that will enable 4-H leaders and informal education professionals to incorporate bioscience content, activities, and resources at their local level. Participants will have the opportunity to work with INBRE faculty located at Tribal Colleges across the state and will make public presentations at local community events, state 4-H Congress, and other regional and national meetings. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE (provided by applicant): The proposed project engages rural and underserved Montana teens with MSU research in neuroscience, infectious disease, and metabolomics, all of which have direct relevance to public health. The project participants will experience the scientific process from basic to applied to translational research, learning that laboratory discoveries can ultimately improve health and save lives. By inspiring participants with stimulating bioscience content and activities, the projects aims to encourage more young Montanans to consider careers in science disciplines that support the NIH mission of improving public health.

The Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) at the University of Hawai'i is awarded a grant to upgrade its communication and data storage capacity to take advantage of a 10 Gigabit fiber optic cable line that is being provided by Hawaiian Telecom to Coconut Island from the Oahu main line. The HIMB research community generates large amounts of highly heterogeneous data stemming from diverse experimental sources, such as DNA sequencing data, confocal microscopy image analysis, and environmental data sensors on the surrounding coral reefs. The high magnitude and diversity of the data collected and used by researchers at HIMB impacts the island?s data network, the storage and computational capacity, and requires a modular and timely approach to data management with robust underlying infrastructure that can efficiently handle it. Thus, HIMB has designed a complete upgrade of its cyber infrastructure. These improvements will take place in two phases: Phase I involves the upgrade of the entire HIMB Network, including the replacement of the central networking and data storage equipment, as well as the deployment of a single centralized HIMB wireless access network throughout the island. Phase II will provide a secure data storage facility and set of user-friendly, web-based data transfer and analysis software. A description of the research facility and its faculty is available at http://www.hawaii.edu/HIMB.

The new HIMB portal system will significantly enhance the ability of HIMB researchers to collaborate and share data with other researchers at UH and across institutions, as well as work with resource managers and NGOs to extend the availability and utility of their research findings. HIMB will be able to extend access to HIMB data resources to faculty at UH Manoa main campus and Community Colleges for use in their courses and research. For example, with improved cyberinfrastructure, we can offer opportunities for college students to remotely operate the confocal microscope to view images of live marine organisms. HIMB is a partner in the NSF Pacific Climate Education Partnership teacher Institute and COSEE Island Earth. This partnership will be delivering teacher summer institutes on climate change science to middle school teachers in Hawaii, American Samoa, Republic of the Marshall Islands, and Palau or the Mariana Islands. The greater bandwidth of the new HIMB system will enhance these teacher institutes by making available real time data exploration.

The Hawaii Innovation Initiative, a bold plan to double University of Hawaii (UH) research, will focus on research strengths in astronomy, earth and ocean sciences, as well as agriculture and health sciences. During the planning for the initiative it became clear to all that meeting this goal would require the development of a highly advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) framework that encompasses high performance computing, data visualization, big data analytics, cybersecurity, large data storage and real time collaboration with scientists around the globe. All these capabilities must be enabled by advanced networking. UH has been extraordinarily successful in designing and implementing research and education (R&E) networks to connect campuses, research facilities, public schools and libraries throughout the Hawaiian Islands with national, international and regional networks. A recent series of NSF network infrastructure and NTIA BTOP awards now provide 10Gbps network connectivity on the islands, between the islands, to the mainland national R&E networks and to international peer networks in Australia and Asia.

With a major upgrade in the campus fiber infrastructure fully funded and underway, this project will complete the necessary upgrade of the campus network at UH Manoa to support data-intensive science by creating a Science DMZ and providing 10Gbps bandwidth increases to key campus research facilities. The project will enable the rollout of OpenFlow on campus, is fully compatible with OSCARS for dynamic circuit provisioning, and will support GENI experimentation. Finally, the project includes the innovative deployment of perfSONAR tools to support continuous monitoring of the campus network with the lowest possible impact on staff.

The proposed perfSONAR work represents a real innovation in campus networking. Exemplar projects with campus and global implications that will benefit from improved campus networks include: the Pan- STARRS Survey Telescope, the Alpha Magnetic Spectroscopy Data Center, microbial oceanography research at the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education STC, the Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology, and sensor based research in climate change, oceanography and disaster preparedness at the UH School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. In addition, broad national and global access will be improved to significant scientific resources based in Hawaii. And as the premier research university in an EPSCoR jurisdiction, UH Manoa has one of the most diverse populations in the nation. UH is a Native Hawaiian-Serving Institution and also enrolls significant and growing numbers of Pacific Islander and Filipino students, who are also highly under-represented in STEM-related employment and education. The increased engagement of under-represented local and mainland students and scholars in research in Hawai?i will lead to improvements in U.S. research and education for the entire nation.

This project develops the the Coral Reef Science & Cyberinfrastructure Network (CReSCyNT). As ecosystem engineers, corals provide the nutritional, economic, and structural basis of ecosystems worth billions of dollars annually. The broader impacts that CReSCyNT encompasses include: (i) integration and exchange with professional societies, (ii) development of visualization products in collaboration with educators and resource managers, (iii) connecting place-based collaborative networks, (iv) building a collaborative community in the coral reef discipline, (v) training of two graduate students, (vi) broad transfer of disciplinary expertise among geoscientists, cybertechnologists, medical scientists and graphic artists (media), (vii) raises visibility and awareness of coral reef data in the geosciences, and (viii) user-friendly web-based visualization tools accessible to the public that serve to showcase the value of coral reef science and the innovative approaches employed by the EarthCube program

The coral reef community has exceptionally diverse data structures and analysis requirements necessary to forward integrative science. It is therefore an exemplar for cyberinfrastructure-enabled advances to other geosciences communities. CReSCyNT will grow a multi-tiered and multidisciplinary network of coral reef researchers, cyberinfrastructure specialists, and computer scientists with the end goal of facilitating integrative and interactive research. This network will match the data sources, data structures, and analysis needs of the coral reef community with the current advances in data management, visualization, and image processing from ocean sciences, biomedical research, and graphic arts to advance coral reef research and meet the increasing challenges of coastal conservation. The network will assemble and communicate to coordinate, plan, and prioritize cyberinfrastructure needs within the coral reef community and with the broader geosciences. Our objectives are to collectively identify needs, best practices, bottlenecks, and avenues or approaches to advance the design and ultimately the development of data management, visualization, and image processing capacity for the coral reef domain that is directly and immediately translatable to the broader geoscience community.The five-member CReSCyNT Facilitating Committee will shepherd the growth of a network around 12 coral reef disciplinary nodes and 5 technology nodes, where each node represents a sub field or discipline of coral reef science (or computer science) that is led by a recognized member of that sub discipline in advocating sharing, transparency, open dialog, creativity, and the integration of data across the geosciences. Facilitated by CReSCyNT meetings, social media, and a presence at professional society conferences, the leader of each node will invite broad participation in CReSCyNT activities from members of their sub discipline. These nodes will be allowed to expand, coalesce, or divide to meet the needs and interests of the subdisciplinary communities, while maintaining a connection to CReSCyNT through the node coordinators and ongoing network activities.

The Advanced CyberInfrastructure - Research and Educational Facilitation: Campus-based Computational Research Support project develops and implements strategies that serve to advance our nation's research and scholarly achievements through the transformation of campus computational capabilities and enhanced coupling to the national cyberinfrastructure environment. Among the project's collaborating institutions are the University of Hawaii, the University of Southern California, the University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin, and Clemson and Harvard Universities. The project brings together education and research institutions that are committed to the vision of advancing scientific discovery through a national network of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI) Research and Education Facilitators (ACI-REFs). Working together in a coordinated effort, the project is dedicated to the adoption of models and strategies to leverage the expertise and experiences of its members to maximize the impact of investment in research computing. Located on the campuses and fully embedded in their local environment, the mission of the ACI-REFs is to extend the reach and impact of campus and national research computing infrastructure on the science conducted by students and faculty.

By building a cloud-like environment for advanced computing infrastructure and support, the project seeks to create a community that fosters seamless integration of cyberinfrastructure and domain researchers and expand the reach of researchers involved in the use of advanced cyberinfrastructure across campuses. The project also seeks to develop the expertise base across partner campuses to support information sharing and to facilitate the formation of extended local and national collaborations. The project explores the potential for the creation of a nationwide alliance of educators to empower local campus researchers to be more effective users of advanced cyberinfrastructure. In particular, the project seeks to work with the "long tail" of ACI users - those scholars and faculty members who traditionally have not benefitted from the power of massively scaled cluster computing but who recognize that their research requires access to more compute power than can be provided by their desktop machines.

The project, "CC*DNI Instrument: High Performance Reliable Network Access to MLO Science Instruments", addresses the problem of network limitations at the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) located on the island of Hawaii in the Pacific ocean. The site is owned and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth System Research Laboratory Global Monitoring Division and cooperatively used by the National Center for Atmospheric Research's High Altitude Observatory and the Institute for Astronomy, a research organization of the University of Hawaii (UH). A wide range of important science observation data is produced by the various instruments located at MLO. Among this data is a widely-used, 50+ year continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa. Less well known are data that measure ozone levels in the upper atmosphere, solar activity such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, young variable stars and mid-size, potentially hazardous asteroids. This data is of national and global significance for policy and public safety and welfare decisions in areas related to measuring and predicting global warming, forecasting disruptions to communications and navigation caused by solar transient events and detecting and predicting Earth impacts of mid-sized asteroids.

Improvements to telescopes and instruments cause volumes of science data produced to increase exponentially over time. Commercial grade, licensed-spectrum wireless radio point-to-point network links are used to solve the critical "last mile" problem of connecting the science instruments located at MLO to the robust University of Hawaii (UH) network for transmission to researchers in Hawaii, the United States and across the globe. The MLO network supports a rapidly growing volume of data (>1.5TB/day) originating from instruments such as COSMO K- Coronagraph (KCor), Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter (CoMP), Precision Solar Photometric Telescope (PSPT), Very Young Stellar Objects Survey (VYSOS), Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) and COSMO Chromospheric Magnetometer (ChroMag). Expected science results made possible by these MLO network improvements include follow up observations of Near Earth Objects, supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and young variable stars; solar observations in real time for space weather forecasts and real-time atmospheric monitoring. The broader impact of the science enabled is to build and support global awareness of environmental and astronomy research, to enable collaborative research with global partners and support the dissemination of unique data sets of immense value to research communities, policy and decision makers and the lay public.

This project builds on the successful prior work of proven partners to support and expand the primary international research and education (R&E) network connections supporting global scientific collaborations involving U.S. researchers and students in the Pacific and Oceania. The project has two main thrusts. First, it leverages prior NSF investments and mature international partnerships to maintain support for the current resilient production 2 x 40Gbps submarine fiber connections from Australia (AARNet) and New Zealand (REANNZ) to the U.S. and, in 2016, upgrades these connections to 2 x 100Gbps. Since the fiber connecting Australia and New Zealand passes through Hawaii, the project also connects one of the world's most important international astronomy sites, Mauna Kea (Hawaii Island), as well as the international observatories on Haleakala (Maui). The project leverages the trans-Pacific submarine fiber backbone to terminate and transport the connections at major U.S. open R&E network exchanges and hubs. Second, the project provides leadership in R&E network capacity building throughout the Pacific Islands, the region of the planet most on the front line of climate change and the last area of the world with no regional R&E network initiative. Intellectual merit and broader impact are reflected in this enabling role for international research collaborations in astronomy, oceanography, high energy physics, coral reef research and more. Outreach into the Pacific Islands provides an unparalleled opportunity to engage Pacific Islanders, who are highly underrepresented in STEM fields, in a wide range of scientific research and education initiatives that are both appealing (astronomy) as well as of critical concern to their communities (oceanography, biodiversity coral reef health, and climate change).

In today's data-driven research environment, the ability to easily and reliably access compute, storage, and derived data sources is as much a necessity as the algorithms used to make the actual discoveries. The earth is not shrinking, it is digitizing, and the ability for US researchers to stay competitive in the global research community will increasingly be determined by their ability to reduce the time from theory to discovery. Over the last 5 years, the open source commercial sector has greatly outpaced the academic research world in its growth and adoption of programming languages, infrastructure design, and interface development. Problems that were primarily academic in nature several years ago are now common in the commercial world. Terms like big data, business intelligence, remote visualization, and streaming event processing, have moved from the classroom to the board room. However, academic projects are largely unable to take advantage of many today's most popular and widely used open source technologies within the context of their campus and shared research infrastructure. The recently completed, NSF funded, Science Gateway Institute planning project revealed just how far behind many communities are. In a survey of over 26,000 NSF-funded PIs, science gateway developers, and leaders in higher education (i.e., CIOs, CTOs, and others), over 85% of respondents said they needed help adapting existing technologies to realize the needs of their gateway. Another 80% said they needed help simply understanding what technologies were available to them. The research community doesn't just see the gap, they live it. This project seeks to quickly close the capability gap between academic and commercial infrastructure by extending and making robust the Agave Platform, an open, Science-as-a-Service cloud platform for reproducible science. Essentially, this project will allow scientists to focus their energies on their science rather than so much on the computing technologies they use.


This Agave Platform will build upon the success of the existing Agave Developer APIs which currently serve over 20,000 users in the plant biology community. This project includes three well-defined efforts which will synergistically evolve the current technology into a sustainable Science-as-a-Service platform for the national research community. First,it will extend the Agave Developer APIs with additional services and management interfaces to create a cohesive, self-provisioning Agave Platform which will enable Science-as-a-Service to the developer community. Second, the project team will partner with commercial and academic institutions to create a community driven Application Exchange (AX) based on Docker container technology to facilitate application transparency, portability, attribution, and reproducibility. Third, the project will consolidate existing open source contributions from projects already with the Agave ecosystem into Agave ToGo, a collection of reference science gateways in multiple languages and web frameworks. The Agave Platform will democratize access to software and infrastructure across all areas of science and engineering by modernizing the mechanisms with which the research community can utilize and access academic research infrastructure. This will bridge the gap between industrial and academic research infrastructure and allow researchers to use a new generation of open source software and technologies. The AX will enable greater interoperability and accountability in the way computational science results are published and reviewed. Through the matching investment of industrial partners, reproducibility, best practices, and rigorous scientific review will be brought to the mainstream and promoted as a fundamental aspect of the scientific process in an open, sustainable way. Agave ToGo will make custom gateways readily available to end users and developers alike. For end users, it will empower them to focus on domain science rather than computer science. For developers, it will stimulate innovation and increase the opportunity for discovery. When combined with the Agave Platform and Application Exchange, Agave ToGo will enable novice users to create scalable, reproducible, digital labs that span their office, commercial cloud, and national data centers in a matter of minutes.

Non-technical Description
This project, titled Ike Wai from the Hawaiian words for knowledge and water, will address the critical needs of the state to maintain its supply of clean water, most of which comes from groundwater sources. This supply is under increasing pressures from population growth, economic development, and climate change. Effective management of water resources requires detailed understanding of the underground geologic features that determine the flow paths of subsurface water; these features are particularly complex in Hawaii due to its volcanic origins and history. This project will greatly improve understanding of where the water that provides for the needs of Hawaii?s cities, farms, and industries comes from and how to ensure a continued, high quality supply. The project team will engage and collaborate with federal, state, and local agencies and community groups concerned with water management. Training and education initiatives will prepare a diverse workforce capable of meeting the research and policy-making challenges of the future.

Technical Description
The overarching scientific goal of this project is to generate more accurate and detailed models of Hawaii?s aquifers, water flow, and transport processes. Geophysical imaging will be used to produce high-resolution 3D maps of subsurface geologic structures. Aquifer volume, flow, and connectivity will be measured by well monitoring, geochemical and submarine groundwater discharge analyses, and the use of microbial diversity as a novel groundwater tracer. The project will also establish the Integrated Knowledge Environment, a centralized cyberinfrastructure platform for data storage, high performance computation, numerical modeling, and visualization. This resource will include data from the project as well as legacy and new data from governmental agency collaborators, and will serve as a tool for both research and water management decision support. The modeling tools and knowledge gained through this project will be extensible to other volcanic Pacific islands. The project will provide training in geophysics, hydrology, and data science to undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, and also provide career development mentoring to these groups and junior faculty. Emphasis will be placed on the recruitment and retention of women and under-represented minorities, particularly Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders.

The goal of a robust cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem is to become a catalyst for discovery and innovation by fostering the development of software frameworks as sustainable production-quality services. Modern science and engineering research increasingly span multiple, geographically distributed data centers and leverage instruments, experimental facilities and a network of national and regional CI. The Tapis framework will enable scientists to accomplish computational and data intensive research in a secure, scalable, and reproducible way allowing scientists to focus on their research instead of the technology needed to accomplish it. Tapis will allow easier implementation, sharing and re-use of complex computational applications, workflows, and infrastructure and enable analysis previously too challenging for researchers. The framework will maximize application portability, allowing flexible scheduling of geographically distributed computational workloads, offer a web-based science-as-a-service to enable multi-facility, decentralized deployments, and provide production-grade support for sensors and streaming data. Tapis will impact multiple science domains, geographic and underrepresented communities with the potential to tackle the world's most important scientific problems spanning astronomy, climate science, medicine, natural hazards, and sustainability science. Education and outreach will include sponsored workshops, hackathons and training materials covering the platform and providing examples to encourage widespread adoption for users across a variety of technical skills and targeting the next generation of young researchers and professionals through immersive workshops and professional development opportunities.

Tapis, will be a new platform for distributed computational experiments that leverages NSF's investments in the Agave, Abaco and CHORDS projects. The Tapis software framework will 1) provide production-grade support for sensors and streaming data, 2) maximize application portability, allowing flexible scheduling of computational workloads across geographically distributed providers, and 3) provide science-as-a-service HTTP-based RESTful APIs to enable multi-facility, decentralized deployments that are both secure and scalable. Working alongside a diverse set of domain researchers to drive real-world use cases, Tapis will be the underlying cyberinfrastructure for computational workflows and science gateways. Tapis will leverage containers to maximize application portability, allowing flexible scheduling of computational workloads across geographically distributed providers. The project will achieve this flexibility by introducing execution system capabilities and application requirements throughout the framework. The Jobs service will be run in a distributed manner to take advantage of data locality and, optionally, to schedule jobs on underutilized systems. Tapis will deploy in centralized or distributed configurations using a microservices architecture that includes a novel, decentralized security and authorization kernel. This kernel can be deployed on-premises to retain local control over confidential data. Custom microservices can be plugged into the security kernel to provide new capabilities, resulting in a cyberinfrastructure ecosystem for distributed computing. To effectively execute Tapis, teams from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the University of Texas at Austin (UT), and the University of Hawaii (UH) will leverage a long-standing collaboration to support investigator-driven, geographically distributed, data-intensive research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The SX-TransPORT Pacific Islands Research and Education Network (PIREN) project supports the primary Research & Education (R&E) network backbone connecting Australia, New Zealand, Guam, and points beyond. Based in Hawaii, the project enables major advances in astronomy, oceanography, coral reef research, high energy physics, biomedical research, and data science. Primary PIREN partners are the Pacific Wave distributed exchange, which ensures that all PIREN-connect networks have full access to the entire domestic and global R&E network fabric, and the Network Startup Research Center (NSRC), which supports the development of campus networks as well as training and education for Pacific Islander network engineers, a highly underrepresented group in STEM.

the PIREN project leverages both the international fiber optic systems that connect to multiple Hawaiian islands as well as the unparalleled international astronomy resources on Maunakea and Haleakala. The PIREN project also established and operates, in partnership with the University of Guam, the Guam Open Research and Education Exchange (GOREX), strategic new R&E network infrastructure in the Pacific that interconnects multiple submarine cable systems from the US, Asia and Australia to provide more resilient and lower latency paths among major research partners including Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Southeast Asia. PIREN is also the principal U.S. initiative to advance R&E networking among underserved Pacific Islands, which now have increased access to fiber-optic systems that interconnect in major hub locations such as Hawaii and Guam, and which are on the forefront of sustainability challenges arising from climate change and sea-level rise.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The goal of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference series is to provide a forum for discussing challenges, opportunities, and solutions among High Performance Computing (HPC) center directors and managers, computational scientists, end users, students, facilitators, educators, HPC system administrators and user support staff, as well as industry and government agency representatives from across the United States and around the world. The conference follows the successful five-year conference series that was hosted by the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program. Building on the success of XSEDE conference series, PEARC aims to broaden the community by including additional campus, national, and international cyberinfrastructure and research computing partners. The conference will be held online from July 26-30, 2020. The project will fund students to participate in the conference, especially in the student program activities, and also fund a small number of junior faculty and researchers to participate in the conference. Some students are presenting papers and posters at the conference, will be given priority for funding The project serves the national interest, as stated by NSF's mission, to promote the progress of science as it provides a forum to disseminate research efforts, connect researchers, and train the next generation of scholars.

Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, the conference will be fully virtual. The student program committee for the conference is recruiting students with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups and from a diverse set of institutions. For the student program, students will participate in (1) a student mentor program, which pairs a student with a senior mentor to help guide the student through conference activities, (2) a student volunteer program, to help run and organize the virtual conference, (3), a speed networking session, where students can meet 1-on-1 with conference exhibitors, and (4) a panel discussion, where students will attend a panel conversation about careers in HPC and career paths into HPC. The funding provided by NSF will have a significant impact on the careers of the future generation of researchers in high performance computing, while encouraging diversity in the field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The frontiers of science are rapidly evolving in regard to availability of data to be analyzed and the breadth and variety of analytical tools that researchers use. To effectively analyze and make sense of this ever-growing cache of information, and to make it possible to leverage new artificial intelligence tools for research, researchers need on-demand, interactive, and programmatic cyberinfrastructure (CI) delivered via the cloud. Jetstream 2 is a system that will be easy to expand and reconfigure, and capable of supporting diverse modes of on-demand access and use, The system will also revolutionize the national cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem by enabling ?AI for Everyone? with virtual GPU capabilities and widespread outreach through the five partners, led by Indiana University. The project promises to enable the research community to use a greater variety of computational resources and to expand its reach into student populations, drawn from a broad range of disciplines, thus contributing to building the future STEM workforce.

Jetstream 2 will be an 8 PetaFLOPS (PFLOPS) cloud computing system using next-generation AMD ?Milan? CPUs and the latest NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs with 18.5 petabytes (PB) of storage. Consisting of five computational systems, Jetstream 2?s primary system will be located at Indiana University, with four modest regional systems deployed nationwide at Arizona State University (ASU), Cornell University, the University of Hawai?i (UH), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Additional partnerships with the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University, and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) will contribute to Jetstream 2?s unparalleled usability and support for a broad range of scientific efforts.

The Jetstream team has been at the forefront of training the research community to transition from batch computing methods to adopt cloud-style usage. Jetstream 2 will continue this path and will ease the transition between academic and commercial cloud computing. Some of the advanced features include push-button virtual clusters, advanced high-availability science gateways services (including commercial cloud integration), federated authentication for JupyterHubs, bare metal and virtualization within the same system through programmable CI, support for on-demand data intensive workloads in addition to on-demand computation, high-performance software-defined storage, and advanced multi-platform orchestration capabilities.

Jetstream 2 will have far-reaching societal benefits. As enhanced educational infrastructure, it will serve more students, from traditional undergraduates to domain-science experts desiring training in computational techniques, than any other NSF-funded CI resource. These students will be better equipped to fully participate in the evolving STEM workforce. In addition to enabling new research, discovery, and innovation across many disciplines, Jetstream 2 will advance the national CI ecosystem and extend the broader impacts of existing NSF investments. Jetstream 2?s ?Core Services? will demonstrate a practical model of distributed cloud computing that will give academic institutions an incentive to invest their own funds in new advanced CI facilities. Although modest in scale, these facilities will represent the state of the art in reconfigurable computing. The implementation of Jetstream 2 will also demonstrate that colleges and universities can invest sustainable amounts of their own funds in highly-effective, flexible CI resources that generate a significant return on investment. In sum, Jetstream 2 will transform the national CI landscape and greatly benefit the nation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The project will support Cyberinfrastructure (CI) training for environmental science research, education, and practice in the Hawaii-Pacific region. Environmental issues in the region affect health, economic stability, and ways of life for Indigenous and other communities. This project will create workshops and curriculum modules for undergraduate and graduate students to increase CI skills across the environmental science domain. By providing the next generation of environmental scientists and practitioners with advanced CI skills, these future professionals will have the ability to use CI to transform science in the region across academic research institutions, public agencies, and community stakeholders.

The project will build a multi-level capacity enhancement program for CI training and skills development that will serve CI users, contributors, and professionals in the environmental and climate science communities. The training materials in the workshops and curriculum modules will be incorporated in undergraduate and graduate courses in order to promote CI skills development and awareness. The project will increase the pool of CI professionals and facilitate knowledge transfer from existing CI professionals to the environmental and climate science communities. As well, it will advance domain-specific CI skills development to position students as CI contributors in their future professional careers. The project will deliver important impacts to the environmental and climate science communities in the Pacific Island region, as there are unique aspects to the region, as well as to others in and beyond the region.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UHM), a Native Hawaiian-serving institution. Over its 5-year duration, this project will fund scholarships for up to three years to 67 unique full-time students (30 undergraduates, 22 Masters and 15 PhD students) who are pursuing degrees in S-STEM-eligible bioscience disciplines. Hawai'i’s unique biodiversity and ecosystem, its unique human diversity, and the pressing challenges it faces in health equity, sustainability and conservation make the State a rich environment for bioscience research and careers. These careers are becoming increasingly reliant on the use and analysis of large datasets, creating the need for enhanced professional preparation in data science (DS) to improve the competitiveness and employability of bioscience graduates. However, financial constraints limit participation of low income, marginalized, and minoritized students in STEM degrees and, critically, in enrichment programs that build skills in areas such as data analytics. This project integrates scholarship support and an inclusive Data Science Community of Practice (COP) program to address these significant challenges.<br/><br/>The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. This scholarship project will work at the interface between biological sciences and data science to promote student access, inclusion and competitiveness through two Specific Aims: (1) Provide transformative financial support for academically talented undergraduate (UG) and graduate (GR) bioscience students with unmet need at UHM. Financial constraints are exclusionary in terms of both student access and success, since low-income students who work extensively to finance their studies suffer from time poverty and decreased ability to participate in enrichment experiences that promote retention and attainment. The project will provide tuition scholarships to 67 unique bioscience undergraduates and graduate students with GPAs>3.0 and unmet financial need. (2) Deploy an evidence-based, context specific intervention comprising a transdisciplinary Data Science Community of Practice. Students will join the Hawai'i Data Science Institute (HI-DSI) ‘Data Fellows’ enrichment program at UHM to build skills in data science and to thrive as part of an inclusive program with strong faculty and peer mentoring. The project intends to research the efficacy of the planned intervention on students’ knowledge, skills and self-efficacy in data science and measure improvements in student retention and graduation rates associated with project participation. Project accomplishments and research findings will be disseminated through both the scientific literature and conference presentations and to institutional, regional and national stakeholders through outreach materials and social media. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.