"AMHERST, Mass. – Registration is now open for the one-day short course “Data Sciences for the Life Sciences in a High-Performance Computing Environment,” sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Amherst Institute for Computational Biology, Biostatistics, and Bioinformatics (ICB3) to be held on Aug. 27 at the Holyoke-based Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC).

Biostatistician Nicholas Reich of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, an expert in statistical modeling of infectious disease data, is part of a team that recently won a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop and extend statistical and modeling methodologies to correct for biases in surveillance data. Specifically, he and colleagues will collaborate with Thailand’s Ministry of Health to study patterns of dengue fever there. Reich will receive about $700,000 of the total grant.

"There's a lot of data out there on the genetic roots of heart disease. The National Institutes of Health have poured billions of dollars into research, the data from which must be made public. But big haystacks are hard to work with. You may come across a few big needles, but smaller stuff that's still important often remains buried.That's the problem a team of medical researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Massachusetts Amherst is aiming to fix."

Faculty members from the College of Natural Sciences and the School of Public Health and Health Sciences are among the recipients of nearly $750,000 in grants from the President’s Science and Technology Initiatives Fund announced June 18 by President Robert L. Caret.