With the goal of synthesizing publicly available data to gain deeper and broader insights, the U.S. National Science Foundation National Synthesis Center for Emergence in the Molecular and Cellular Sciences (NCEMS) opened last year at Penn State.
“The research engines of the center are our working groups, which are collaborative teams of scientists from diverse fields from across the country and around the world coming together to address specific questions using this publicly available data,” said O’Brien, who is also the director of the center. “There are biochemists, biologists, statisticians, physicists, computational biologists, and bioinformaticians on these teams collaborating in this way.”