Peter Arzberger, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator / Director – NBCR
Director, Life Sciences Initiatives, UCSD
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0043
La Jolla, CA 92093-0043
[email protected]
858-822-1079 (voice)
858-822-4767 (fax)
I am the Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resources (NBCR), an NIH National Center for Research Resource (NCRR) award. NBCR typifies the merging of computing and information technologies to catalyze and facilitate biomedical research across a broad range of biological scales. Its goal is to bring to the national biomedical research community end-to-end tools and techniques from the growing cyberinfrastructure. NBCR produces tools and services for the biomedical community to better address researchers’ issues that involve multiple scales and translational medicine. Furthermore, NBCR has helped to coordinate activities of several computational, informational, and visualization resources of NCRR (e.g., those that participated in the Supercomputing Conference ).
Internationally, there is much to be gained from working with colleagues to help develop that cyberinfrastructure. In 2002, I helped establish the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) which is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). PRAGMA’s goal is to build sustained collaborations between researchers around the Pacific Rim by building applications on top of the immerging grid hardware and software (www.pragma-grid.net). As of March 2008, PRAGMA consists of more than 30 institutions around the Pacific Rim. I serve as Chair of the PRAGMA Steering Committee.
In 2004, I helped initiate the Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences (PRIME) which provides opportunities for UCSD undergraduates to conduct an internship at a PRAGMA site. PRIME was initiated with funding from NSF, with additional support from Cal-(IT)2. Currently we send students to seven sites around the Pacific Rim.
Another outgrowth of PRAGMA, in particular the EcoGrid activity of the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan is Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (LTER) community, to facilitate the interaction between ecologists and computational and information scientists. I serve as chair of the US LTER National Advisory Board.
As former Executive Director of SDSC and NPACI, I helped coordinate local computational biology activities and was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. Before coming to the UCSD campus, I worked at the National Science Foundation, as program director of the Computational Biology Program in BIO and program director of the Statistics and Probability program in MPS, and as Deputy NSF High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Coordinator.