NIH Wants To Harness Biomedical Big Data

Last week the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced (H/T NextGov) a four-year funding program that could invest up to $96 million over four years to wrangle the large datasets generated by biomedical research.  Called the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program, the program would establish six to eight Centers of Excellence focused on “the development and distribution of innovative approaches, methods, software, and tools for data sharing, integration, analysis and management.”  The centers would also work on education and training for students and practitioners on the use of large datasets.

The BD2K initiative was launched last December and has four major themes, including the centers of excellence.  The other areas of emphasis are training, facilitating widespread use of data, and new analysis methods and software.  The program is hosting a series of workshops that will be open to the public via webcast (physical attendance/participation is by invitation only).

If you are interested in pursuing the funding opportunity, plan on participating in the September workshop/webinar on the program, and start work on your application, which is due November 20.  Successful applications will include a multidisciplinary team, and while they will focus on a particular research question, the resulting work product should be generalizable beyond the research question and the biomedical area of research.  Ideally the selected centers would be able to work together in extracting generalizable principles for use by all researchers dealing with big data.  The centers would be ready to go sometime in the second half of 2014.