Managed by the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice, Collaborative Advances in Biomedical Computing (CABC) is a seed funding program aimed at supporting members of the Rice research community looking to form new collaborations and partnerships with researchers in the Texas Medical Center (TMC). The CABC program seeks to be a catalyst for research collaboration focusing on computing and computational science and engineering as a key enabler for biomedical research. The goal is to encourage and support new projects that bridge information technology/high performance computing research at Rice and biomedical and health‐care related research in the TMC. Projects with applications to cancer research are strongly encouraged.
The program aims to support efforts that:
- can demonstrate a clear institutional benefit AND/OR can demonstrate a clear potential for external funding
- explore opportunities at the interface of information and computing technology and biomedicine
- involve ideas and faculty across multiple institutions in the TMC
- support community building efforts with a potential high return on investment
Proposals that demonstrate potential for lasting impact, give rise to new collaborations, and have a high probability for attracting external long‐term funding are strongly encouraged.
For over 40 years Rice University and the Texas Medical Center have partnered on a wide array of undertakings including joint degree programs, collaborative research, teaching, and outreach projects. These activities have enabled Rice, in partnership with collaborators in the TMC, to leverage hard-won achievements in many fields. Rice brings to the partnership complementary strengths in information technology, computing, biotechnology and nanotechnology, as well as assets in management education, social sciences, and the humanities. The medical schools and hospitals of the TMC bring to the table extremely rich sources of expertise and scholarship across all of biomedicine, in both basic and clinical sciences.
The productive partnership between Rice and the TMC includes joint research. Through a variety of existing partnerships, it has become apparent that dramatic advances in cancer research, and research in other areas of biomedicine, increasingly depend on advances and applications of computing and information technology. The CABC seed funding program, made possible by the John & Ann Doerr Fund for Computational Biomedicine, seeks to encourage the development of both emerging activities and existing areas in information technology and its applications to biomedicine. The primary purpose of the CABC program is to stimulate development of novel and exciting ideas enabled by computing and information technology. The program is targeted at supporting early stage research with the goal of incubating and accelerating collaboration between Rice and TMC researchers.
The CABC program is specifically targeting opportunities at the interface of computational methods, algorithms, tools and biomedicine that demonstrate the capability of accelerating and transforming biomedical research leading to improved medical diagnostics, treatment and care. It is expected that funded research will, in addition to forming new collaboration, provide new software capabilities that not only address needs in biomedical research, but that can efficiently run on modern, high-performance computer architectures. Without this, the biomedical research community will not have the resources to develop all of the applications needed to achieve the dramatic advances possible through the use of information technologies.
Funding for this program is made possible by the John & Ann Doerr Fund for Computational Biomedicine.