Exabytes of data.
Community-scale Science.
AI- and Data-driven Research.
The U.S. National Science Foundation National Synthesis Center for Emergence in the Molecular and Cellular Sciences (NCEMS) is catalyzing multidisciplinary scientific teams to leverage AI and data science to synthesize a myriad of publicly available data to answer the most fundamental questions in molecular and cellular biology, stimulating novel questions, answering long-standing mysteries, recruiting the best talent, and training the next-generation workforce of data savvy scientist, all while following gold standard science practices.
Background Image Credit: National Science Foundation
News
$10,000 Prize in NCEMS Kaggle Competition
Scientific progress is increasingly limited not by computational power, but by the vast amount of experimental detail locked in unstructured scientific text, where critical metadata needed for reuse and integration is buried in natural language rather than captured in standardized formats like SDRF.
Open Call for Synthesis Brainstorming Session at NCEMS Annual Summit 2026
NCEMS invites the scientific community to submit a one-page proposal by February 18, 2026 to lead a Focus Area Session at the NSF NCEMS Annual Summit, held August 3–7, 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA. Selected proposers will serve as Session Leads with travel, lodging, and meals fully covered.
Annual Summit
Fall 2025 (August 5th – August 8th)
The second NCEMS Annual Summit was held August 5th – 8th, 2025! This 4-day event brough together participants from around the world, including faculty, postdocs, graduate students, collaborative partner members, and representatives of data repositories. Together, we worked to identify the most pressing research challenges and opportunities for synthesis science over the next decade and helped set the research agenda for NCEMS moving forward.
If you would like to propose a focus area or think that you would be a great addition to the next Summit, please reach out to ncems@psu.edu — we’re excited to continue building the future of synthesis science with you!
Our Science
NCEMS accelerates discoveries in molecular and cellular sciences, combining the latest data science and computational methods, the most relevant publicly available data, with scientists from diverse disciplines.
Participate
Join a community driven to collaborate, ask novel questions, and impact the fields of molecular and cellular sciences through community-scale synthesis.
Events
From our annual summit meeting to education and training events, to hack-a-thons and bootcamps, building community is a core component of our mission.