Robert Druzinsky - US grants

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

The proposal seeks funding to replace existing biological research labs with 11 modern wet laboratories designed to support faculty and student research and research training at the undergraduate and master levels. The renovated biology lab complex will support research projects with an emphasis on environmental biology questions. The laboratories include facilities focused on research in population ecology, plant ecology, comparative physiology, anatomy, microbiology, and science education. The renovated laboratories will be used to advance knowledge and understanding of prairie and woodland restorations with emphasis on natural and controlled fire regimes; polyphasic DNA-based molecular analyses of diversity, structure, function, and population dynamics of microbial communities; comparative physiology and environmental toxicology; conservation biology and vertebrate ecology focused on population structure, community composition, and ecotoxicity; functional morphology of mammalian jaw mechanisms; and modeling hydrological and ecophysiological processes in forest ecosystems.

The institution serves a diverse student body of mainly adult learners, averaging 34 years of age, with the majority attending school part-time (74%). The total student population includes a high proportion of students from groups that are under-represented in science and engineering. In the Academic Year 2007-2008, roughly one-third of undergraduates were low-income students and over half were first-generation college students. Amongst other impacts on the integration of research and education, will be the inclusion of research experiences into the preparation of secondary school science teachers.

This award was made to transform the current prototype of the Feeding Experiments End-user Database (FEED) into a data-rich, publicly-available source of physiological data on feeding in mammals that incorporates a novel ontology module. An important innovation is the development of five non-overlapping ontologies related to feeding behavior, function, and structure that will provide the constrained definitions of terms necessary to permit computational comparisons in analyses of phenotypic diversity. Ontology construction begins with an ontology workshop. Ontology and database development will be driven by a set of six use cases that comprise synthetic, phylogenetically-informed analyses aimed at understanding the integrated roles of physiology and morphology during a variety of feeding behaviors in mammals. The research will to initiate new collaborations involving FEED as a primary data source by engaging three scientific communities (reptile feeding physiologists, bioengineers, and developmental biologists) in a series of interdisciplinary use case development workshops. During the workshops, the project team will design and commence work on new use cases that will guide efforts to extend the infrastructure of FEED and permit synthetic studies that cut across traditional knowledge domains. This project is innovative because it generates a proof-of-concept database to facilitate understanding of the complexity and connectivity between behaviors, physiological mechanisms, and structures involved in mammalian feeding across multiple scales of organization, and because it includes work to insure that FEED is a tool that is extensible to other scientific communities.

Broader impacts include development and public release of novel bioinformatic research infrastructure for physiology, a field that has traditionally been on the periphery of bioinformatics. This project promotes interdisciplinary collaborations among scientists across four knowledge domains. Training of undergraduate and graduate students in research on morphological and physiological analysis as well as database and ontology construction is an important focus. FEED will also be utilized as a teaching tool in bioinformatics courses aimed at undergraduate and graduate education in informatics. Dissemination of project outcomes and public access to the FEED database will be available at www.feedexp.org.