NESCent Annual Report, Year 5

SUMMARY OF NESCENT ACTIVITIES IN YEAR 5

In the final year of funding of its inaugural grant, NESCent has consolidated its position as a major international Center for the study of synthetic evolutionary biology. Highlights of activities during year 5 include the following.

• We have conducted another successful year of applications and reviews. Activities undertaken at NESCent span a wide range of topics, covering the breadth of evolutionary biology and related disciplines; most are highly interdisciplinary. Many of the projects funded in earlier years have reach fruition and have resulted in high impact publications.

• We have expanded our postdoctoral training and professional development programs. Many postdoctoral fellows at the Center have moved into tenure track faculty positions; others have accepted further postdoctoral training opportunities. We continue to have an active in house community of scientists.

• NESCent’s informatics program continues to be a world leader in evo-informatics. It has successfully supported the informatics needs of sponsored science, it has engaged in a variety of activities to promote standards for evolutionary data and software and it has taken the lead in a number of valuable cyberinfrastructure initiatives. The Dryad initiative is continuing to mature, and several prominent journals are poised to enter as full partners.

• NESCent continues to offer a range of training opportunities, from the well regarded evo-informatics courses, to the remote internships sponsored by Google and other organizations, to teacher training in evolutionary biology.

• Our education and outreach group has continued activities that bind together a wide range of educators and scientist to product material and construct approaches to make evolutionary biology more accessible to students and the public. We participated in a large number of local, national and international events commemorating the 200th Anniversary of Darwin’s birth.

• We have partnered with a number of organizations to increase the participation of minority students in evolutionary biology, with particular emphasis on bringing more students to the annual Evolution meeting, and also providing a range of programs at the SACNAS meeting.

• With the hiring of a full time communications manager, NESCent’s goal of developing a program to effectively communicate the results of NESCent science, as well as cutting edge evolutionary biology in general, has made a huge leap forward. We have developed a highly successful series of press releases, we have developed programs to communicate via a number of new technologies, and we have forged new links to scientific journalists and the blogging community.

• Throughout the current year we have worked to position ourselves for the next 5 years. A new Director and Associate Director of Science have been recruited. We have pursued new space for our ever expanding programs, and we have modified and developed new governance and oversight boards.