A University of Wyoming life science team has received a $6 million National Science Foundation grant.
The grant provides funding for 12 postdoctoral researchers, eight of whom will work at UW. Principal investigator Alex Buerkle said they will focus on understanding the genes in organisms and how those organisms interact with their surroundings.
"We're developing models for life sciences, but within the life sciences we're really focusing on three areas," he said. "We're trying to understand the traits of organisms, understand community ecology, so the sets of organisms that live together, and then we're studying aquatic ecosystems."
The team includes professors from the botany and zoology and physiology departments. Buerkle said the models they will use are similar.
"Even though we really typically spend our days thinking about different science, the methods, computationally and statistically, to address those problems cut across those areas," he said.
Buerkle said there is a lot of data in the life sciences, and this project will help develop models to explain that data. The grant begins this year and will fund the postdocs for four years.
Have a question about this story? Please contact the reporter, Ashley Piccone, at apiccone@uwyo.edu
